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June 21, 2004
Buchanan: The dog days of the War PartyWorldNetDaily: The dog days of the War Party Posted: June 7, 2004 Fourteen months ago, after the 3rd Infantry Division and Marines swept into Baghdad, Washington was at the feet of the neoconservatives who had been plotting and propagandizing for an invasion for years. A celebratory breakfast was held at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, where William Kristol, Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen held forth in a spirit of joyous anticipation of wars and victories to come. At a dinner party at the vice president's mansion, Kenneth ("Cakewalk") Adelman, Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, and Paul Wolfowitz toasted one another and the president. As the '60s song went, "Those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end." Now, enmeshed in a guerrilla war, Americans are demanding to know who told us we would be welcomed with garlands of flowers. Who said our troops would come home in a year? Who said democracy would flourish across the Arab world? Who misled us about the weapons of mass destruction? Who lied us into war? But the neocons may be facing problems more serious than entering the history books alongside the Whiz Kids of the McNamara era who got it wrong in Vietnam and left 58,000 behind. Some War Party leaders may see careers cashiered and reputations ruined. June 03, 2004
Bush likens terror fight to World War IILexington Herald-Leader | 06/03/2004 | Bush likens terror fight to World War II FINAL VICTORY COULD TAKE DECADES, PRESIDENT SAYS IN BID FOR SUPPORT |
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Tillman Killed by 'Friendly Fire'
Tillman Killed by 'Friendly Fire' (washingtonpost.com)
Pat Tillman, the former pro football player, was killed by other American troops in a "friendly fire" episode in Afghanistan last month and not by enemy bullets, according to a U.S. investigation of the incident.
...
May 23, 2004
Failure Now May be an Option
Failure Now May be an Option
permacopy
Newsday
WASHINGTON -- Since the invasion of Iraq 14 months ago, a favorite mantra in political Washington has been that "failure is not an option."
But after the repeated disasters of recent weeks, warnings of the possibility -- if not the inevitability -- of "failure" or "defeat" are beginning to echo through the marble halls of Congress and the ornate conference rooms of Washington think tanks.
...
Issue Of War On Terrorism Medals
Issue Of War On Terrorism Medals
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon announced Friday that it will issue a Global War on Terrorism Medal for troops who have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and other combat zones as well as those who performed support duty, such as guarding domestic airports after the Sept. 11 attacks.
...
May 22, 2004
May 21, 2004
Marines Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stack
Marines Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stack
Armed with cash, U.S. troops attempt to make amends with Iraqi civilians who suffered.
By Tony Perry, Times Staff Writer
AL BO ALI DAKEL, Iraq — In accordance with the brutal accounting of modern combat, cash payments were made Thursday to people in this small village who suffered during recent fighting between U.S. Marines and insurgents in nearby Fallouja.
The village leader received $15,000 on behalf of residents in compensation for dead livestock, uprooted trees, damaged fields and other losses. The Marines tried to bargain him down to $10,000, but he stood firm.
The son of a man killed by gunfire while driving in a battle zone received $2,500. And a man who said his 7-year-old daughter was killed as she tended the family's sheep also received $2,500.
Now that the fighting between Marines and insurgents has tapered off in the area, the U.S. military is attempting to make amends with noncombatants who suffered. The Americans hope cash will win friends and help bring peace in this part of the volatile Sunni Triangle.
Under Marine rules, a payment for a death goes directly to the family. Payments for community losses can be funneled through an elder, sheik or village leader.
"I know we cannot replace your loss, but we would like to offer a small apology in the form of $2,500 so we can move on in friendship," Capt. Kevin Coughlin, judge advocate general for the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division, told the man who said his daughter had been killed.
"I accept your apology," said Saady Mohamed Abdala.
Whether his daughter was killed by fire from Marines or insurgents — or whether the man even had a daughter — was not entirely clear.
"There's really no way to verify these accounts," Coughlin said. "It's really irrelevant. In making these payments, the U.S. is not taking responsibility for the loss, only offering an apology for a loss that occurred as a result of combat operations."
With a Marine disburser carrying a satchel with more than $80,000, Coughlin and a civil affairs team spent the afternoon combing rural villages just north of Fallouja, where Marines battled insurgents for weeks until handing over security in the city to an Iraq army unit early this month. Hundreds of civilians are believed to have been killed.
Under Marine Corps rules, the top payment a battalion can make for the loss of a family member is $2,500. There is no limit to the amount that can be paid for loss of possessions and livelihood, but the $15,000 paid to village leader Almas Tirkeq was considered on the high side.
That's a lot of cash to average Iraqis, in a land where unemployment is high, a private in the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps makes about $60 a month and a colonel less than $200.
Tirkeq, a large, ebullient man with a wide grin and ingratiating manner, had come prepared with an itemized list of losses, including two cows, five sheep, two donkeys, seven trees, several buildings and acres of farmland in this village of several thousand person.
"I hope this will better the lives of him and his people and we will be able to continue to work together," Coughlin told an interpreter, who passed on the words to Tirkeq.
"This area was neglected by the old regime, and we consider what you are doing a sign of friendship," Tirkeq replied. "Thank you, thank you."
Tirkeq received the money on behalf of the village with the understanding that he would make sure residents who suffered losses are compensated. By making the payment in public, Marines hoped to ensure that he does.
Proof needed for payment Thursday was minimal: the word of village leaders, a story that seemed plausible, some face-to-face contact for reassurance.
"We're giving them the benefit of the doubt," said Marine Capt. Steve Coast, head of a civil affairs team.
The benefit of the doubt was needed most in the case of the man who said his daughter had been killed. Early in the discussions, villagers sought compensation for the man, who wasn't present. A resident was sent to fetch him, but returned alone. The Marines refused to pay.
Then, as the Marines were preparing to leave, a man approached Coughlin and, through the village leader, announced he was the father of the dead child. "Weren't you here the entire time?" Coughlin asked, in a slightly incredulous tone.
"No, no, no," Tirkeq said. "He is my friend. He just walked up here. He is the father."
Coughlin quickly polled other Marines and Westerners standing in the dusty courtyard near the chickens, cows, donkeys and sheep. "Did anybody see him before this?" he asked.
When the village leader had first discussed the dead child, there was a reference to a 6-year-old boy; the man identified as the father said the child was a 7-year-old girl. No account was made of the discrepancy.
In the end, the Marines took Tirkeq and the man at their word.
The outreach method for payments being practiced in the village is unusual. Most of those who say they lost relatives or property will be required to work through the Fallouja mayor's office; their claims will be vetted by an Iraqi judge before being presented to the Marines.
But the Marines have lavished extra attention on the villages around Fallouja. Although U.S. combat units have largely withdrawn from the city, Marines are still searching for insurgents and weapons smugglers in the outlying areas. Friendship with residents out here has a strategic value.
Marines believe the villages to have been neutral territory during the fight, with few of the area's young men joining the insurgency. Although the brunt of the fighting took place inside the city limits, there were skirmishes in the countryside, including nightly ambushes, which the Marines blame in part on "foreign fighters" from outside Iraq.
The village leader reminded Coughlin that residents had helped Marines when one of their tanks became bogged in the mud. "We are a peaceful village," he insisted.
The 1st Marine Regiment recently received $2.7 million to pay for structural damage done by the fighting. Commanders also can take money from their own budgets. Payments for deaths come from the Marine Corps' operations and maintenance budget.
Bahjat Ali Abed, a sad-eyed man in his 30s, said his father, Ali Abed Farham, was killed while driving near the Fallouja train station, a site of numerous skirmishes. He said the Marines later searched the slain man's car for weapons but found none.
On the hood of a mud-colored Humvee, as a curious crowd of men from the village pressed forward, Coughlin asked Abed to sign a document and offered an apology. And he offered a personal word, apparently trying to reach out to the Iraqi.
"I too lost my father not long ago," Coughlin said.
Abed did not reply but stepped back into the crowd, carefully counting 25 crisp $100 bills.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
Iraqis Hail Falluja 'Victory' as U.S. Changes Tack
Iraqis Hail Falluja 'Victory' as U.S. Changes Tack
from Saturday 01 May 2004
Videos Amplify Picture of Violence
This article describes many of the newly-leaked photos and videos from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. It also shows some of the pictures and a video. The video shows a soldier (it looks like Graner to me) smacking a deeply shaken prisoner, who is apparently being forced to strip.
May 20, 2004
Schneider: War Has Its Reasons
AEI - News & Commentary
War Has Its Reasons
By William Schneider
Posted: Wednesday, March 26, 2003
...
And so, reason No. 3 is ideology.
Influential neoconservatives, including Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, have been arguing for years in favor of an assertive U.S. strategy in the post-Cold War world. In 1997, they and other like-minded intellectuals organized the Project for the New American Century, which urged then-President Clinton to confront Iraq. "America was being too timid, too weak, and too unassertive in the post-Cold War world," Kristol argues. "American leadership was key to, not only world stability, but any hope for spreading democracy and freedom around the world."
Hartcher says, "This [war] is about the neoconservative view, the idealistic view, the Wilsonian view, that the world would be a better place if only America can make it that way." The neoconservatives advocate a paradigm shift in which the United States spreads American values by asserting American power-by force, if necessary.
The neoconservative champion is Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., now an ardent supporter of war with Iraq. "We must keep our nerve," McCain said last month, "have the courage to understand what our experiences have taught us, have faith in the necessity and rightness of our cause, and do what must be done to make this a safer, freer, better world."
Has Bush adopted their cause? Apparently. In his February 26 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, he said, "By the resolve and purpose of America and our friends and allies, we will make this an age of progress and liberty. Free people will set the course of history. And free people will keep the peace of the world."
It is a bold, ambitious, and risky agenda. But it just may be the real reason America is going to war.
May 19, 2004
The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
The New York Times > Week in Review > The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
May 18, 2004
Seymour Hersh: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
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.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. ...
May 15, 2004
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
You may have already heard about this.
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
An Islamist website claimed today that a group in Iraq affiliated with Al Qaeda had beheaded an American contractor to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. military jails.
In a video posted on the group's website and picked up by other news websites, Nick Berg, a 26-year-old communications businessman...
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked (washingtonpost.com)
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, joined by the foreign ministers of nations making key contributions of military forces in Iraq, emphatically said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after July 1, they would pack up without protest.
"We would leave," Powell said, noting that he was "not ducking the hypothetical, which I usually do," to avoid confusion on the extent of the new government's authority.
His statement, which was echoed by the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan, and by the U.S. administrator in Iraq, came one day after conflicting testimony on Capitol Hill by administration officials on the issue. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on Thursday, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman appeared to say that the interim government could order the departure of foreign troops, only to be contradicted by Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp, sitting at his side, who asserted that only an elected government could do so. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.
...
May 12, 2004
The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
Boston Globe / Op-ed / The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
by Ellen Goodman
MAYBE I SHOULDN'T be hard on the president for flunking his pop quiz on foreign policy. After all, it wasn't a take-home exam and he didn't have Dick Cheney by his side. But when a reporter at the prime-time news conference asked what errors he'd made and what lessons he learned, the president was stumped. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet," he said.
After another golly-gee-whiz stumble, he added, "you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."
Of course, if he needs a little help, I'm happy to share a few of the greatest hits from his bloopers reel. Mistakes? Howsabout them weapons of mass destruction? Howsabout the persistent links to nuclear weapons? Howsabout the connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Howsabout the "Mission Accomplished" speech or the idea that Iraqis would see us as liberators not occupiers? Anyone hear an "oops"?
In the aftermath, many called the president's refusal to admit mistakes a savvy political strategy: Strong men never say they're sorry. But I think there's something much more chilling going on. He truly doesn't believe he made any mistakes.
Last year, we launched a preemptive, unilateral war (OK, there are 60 New Zealanders, 230 Nicaraguans, and 27 soldiers from Kazakhstan, etc.) on the explicit grounds that Saddam was an imminent threat to our nation. Now the moral justification for this war has simply, seamlessly and without explanation morphed from defending ourselves to "changing the world."
The president said that even if he'd known then what he knows today, he would still have invaded Iraq. In an honest, passionate moment he proclaimed, "Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. . . . That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned."
But is that what the Senate felt called to do when it gave him the chit for war? Or the country?
It's not just that "weapons of mass destruction" have become "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities." The commander in chief has become the evangelist.
Remember when we disparaged George the Father for his breezy dismissal of "the vision thing"? What was he? A mere pragmatist. Well, George the Son has the vision thing in its pure tunnel form: The facts don't blur the fixed view.
In Texas, they talk about a man who is all hat and no cattle. But in Washington, we have a Texan who is all vision and no reality.
When another reporter asked the president how he got "it" -- the WMDs, our welcome as liberators -- so wrong, Bush stumbled again. Wrong isn't on his answer sheet because he's conflated two definitions of the same word: the wrong that's "incorrect" and the wrong that's "immoral." And if what he's done is moral it cannot be a mistake.
...
CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
The New York Times > News > CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An American soldier's video diary showing her disdain for Iraqi detainees who died in her charge is to be broadcast by a U.S. network on Wednesday in a further escalation of the prisoner abuse scandal that has shaken the Bush administration and provoked world outrage.
CBS, which two weeks ago broadcast the first pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, said on Tuesday its ``60 Minutes II'' program would show video footage depicting conditions there and at another U.S.-run prison in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca.
...
CBS said the home video did not show scenes of abuse but included comments by the soldier, whose name was not revealed to protect her identity, that make clear her dislike for the camp and the prisoners under her control.
``I hate it here,'' she said on the tape. ``I want to come home. I want to be a civilian again. We actually shot two prisoners today. One got shot in the chest for swinging a pole against our people on the feed team. One got shot in the arm. We don't know if the one we shot in the chest is dead yet.''
In her video, the soldier described the hazards of Camp Bucca. ``This is a sand viper,'' she said. ``One bite will kill you in six hours. We've already had two prisoners die of it, but who cares? That's two less for me to worry about.''
...
May 11, 2004
US tactics condemned by British officers
Telegraph | News | US tactics condemned by British officers
Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.
...
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
(permacopy)
The general from Saddam Hussein's army put in charge of the volatile city of Falluja challenged his U.S. backers Sunday, saying they were wrong to say foreign Islamic guerrillas were behind an insurgency there.
...
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
(permacopy)
The independent Army Times newspaper, read widely in the U.S. military, on Monday suggested Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilian and military leaders should be removed over the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal.
"This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential -- even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war," the private weekly newspaper said in an editorial.
...
William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
...
So...the reason to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction is destroyed. The reason to go to war because of connections to September 11 is destroyed. The reason to go to war in order to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq is destroyed.
What is left? The one reason left has been unfailingly flapped around by defenders of this administration and supporters of this war: Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible man. He killed his own people. He tortured his own people. The Iraqis are better off without him, and so the war is justified.
And here, now, is the final excuse destroyed. We have killed more than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in this invasion, and maimed countless others. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison show that we, like Saddam Hussein, torture and humiliate the Iraqi people. Worst of all, we do this in the same prison Hussein used to do his torturing. The "rape rooms," often touted by Bush as justification for the invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the torturers now. We have achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of Baghdad.
This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but George W. Bush's ridiculous "War on Terror" as a whole.
I say ridiculous because this "War on Terror" was never, ever something we were going to win. What began on September 11 with the world wrapping us in its loving embrace has collapsed today in a literal orgy of shame and disgrace. This happened, simply, because of the complete failure of moral leadership at the highest levels.
...
British troops in torture scandal
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | British troops in torture scandal
(Permacopy)
The controversy over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners deepened last night when photographs were released apparently showing the torture of a PoW by a British soldier.
The Ministry of Defence launched an immediate investigation into the circumstances surrounding the photographs, in which a prisoner appears to be battered with rifle butts, threatened with execution and urinated on by his captors.
...
The photographs were given to the Mirror newspaper by serving soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, who told the paper that such acts of brutality against prisoners in Iraq were widespread.
The soldiers said the man, thought to be an alleged thief, was thrown off the back of a moving wagon after his eight-hour ordeal, and it is not known whether he lived or died.
...
Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed
CBS News | Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed | May 6, 2004 17:54:04
May 10, 2004
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
Excellent article.
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
May 09, 2004
May 08, 2004
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
by Jeof Oyster
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Browne: Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
by Harry Browne
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II: Weighing the Costs
May 07, 2004
Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
The New York Times > News > Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
Three U.S. military policemen who served at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison said on Thursday they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.
"It is a common thing to abuse prisoners," said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I saw beatings all the time.
"A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression."
...
A sergeant in their group was admonished last year after holding down a prisoner for other men to beat, both Leal and Sindar said. They said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as "camel jockey' or slogans such as "I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail."
Photos obtained by Reuters show U.S. soldiers looking into body bags of three Iraqi prisoners killed by 870th MP guards during a prison riot in the fall of 2003. One photograph shows a bearded man with much of his bloodied forehead removed by the force of a bullet.
"We were constantly being attacked, we had terrible support ... also being extended all the time, a lot of us had problems with our loved ones suffering from depression," said MP Dave Bischell. "It all contributes to the psychological component of soldiers when they get stressed."
When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.
"That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard," Leal said.
U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
The New York Times > News > U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
May 06, 2004
May 05, 2004
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
...
April 30, 2004
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
This page is an in-depth update on many aspects of the war, with extensive links to original sources.
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'
US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
US marines have agreed a framework plan to withdraw from the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja, says the local American military commander.
Lt Col Brennan Byrne said this would allow a newly created all-Iraqi force to take control of the city.
He said this would happen on Friday, but US defence officials in Washington denied knowledge of a firm deal.
...
Deal to End Falluja Standoff Takes Shape; 10 Americans Die
FALLUJA, Iraq — American military officials said today that a new Iraqi security force made up of former Iraqi soldiers and commanders will replace the American troops now in Falluja and assume responsibility for the city's security.
The new force, known as the Falluja Protection Army, will include as many as 1,000 Iraqi soldiers led by a former general from the army of Saddam Hussein, American military officials said. A Marine commander, Col. Brennan Byrne, said the force will be a subordinate command of the American military, according to news services.
...
April 28, 2004
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 27, 2004
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Failure Now May be an Option
Failure Now May be an Option
permacopy
Newsday
WASHINGTON -- Since the invasion of Iraq 14 months ago, a favorite mantra in political Washington has been that "failure is not an option."
But after the repeated disasters of recent weeks, warnings of the possibility -- if not the inevitability -- of "failure" or "defeat" are beginning to echo through the marble halls of Congress and the ornate conference rooms of Washington think tanks.
...
Issue Of War On Terrorism Medals
Issue Of War On Terrorism Medals
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon announced Friday that it will issue a Global War on Terrorism Medal for troops who have served in Iraq, Afghanistan and other combat zones as well as those who performed support duty, such as guarding domestic airports after the Sept. 11 attacks.
...
May 21, 2004
Marines Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stack
Marines Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stack
Armed with cash, U.S. troops attempt to make amends with Iraqi civilians who suffered.
By Tony Perry, Times Staff Writer
AL BO ALI DAKEL, Iraq — In accordance with the brutal accounting of modern combat, cash payments were made Thursday to people in this small village who suffered during recent fighting between U.S. Marines and insurgents in nearby Fallouja.
The village leader received $15,000 on behalf of residents in compensation for dead livestock, uprooted trees, damaged fields and other losses. The Marines tried to bargain him down to $10,000, but he stood firm.
The son of a man killed by gunfire while driving in a battle zone received $2,500. And a man who said his 7-year-old daughter was killed as she tended the family's sheep also received $2,500.
Now that the fighting between Marines and insurgents has tapered off in the area, the U.S. military is attempting to make amends with noncombatants who suffered. The Americans hope cash will win friends and help bring peace in this part of the volatile Sunni Triangle.
Under Marine rules, a payment for a death goes directly to the family. Payments for community losses can be funneled through an elder, sheik or village leader.
"I know we cannot replace your loss, but we would like to offer a small apology in the form of $2,500 so we can move on in friendship," Capt. Kevin Coughlin, judge advocate general for the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division, told the man who said his daughter had been killed.
"I accept your apology," said Saady Mohamed Abdala.
Whether his daughter was killed by fire from Marines or insurgents — or whether the man even had a daughter — was not entirely clear.
"There's really no way to verify these accounts," Coughlin said. "It's really irrelevant. In making these payments, the U.S. is not taking responsibility for the loss, only offering an apology for a loss that occurred as a result of combat operations."
With a Marine disburser carrying a satchel with more than $80,000, Coughlin and a civil affairs team spent the afternoon combing rural villages just north of Fallouja, where Marines battled insurgents for weeks until handing over security in the city to an Iraq army unit early this month. Hundreds of civilians are believed to have been killed.
Under Marine Corps rules, the top payment a battalion can make for the loss of a family member is $2,500. There is no limit to the amount that can be paid for loss of possessions and livelihood, but the $15,000 paid to village leader Almas Tirkeq was considered on the high side.
That's a lot of cash to average Iraqis, in a land where unemployment is high, a private in the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps makes about $60 a month and a colonel less than $200.
Tirkeq, a large, ebullient man with a wide grin and ingratiating manner, had come prepared with an itemized list of losses, including two cows, five sheep, two donkeys, seven trees, several buildings and acres of farmland in this village of several thousand person.
"I hope this will better the lives of him and his people and we will be able to continue to work together," Coughlin told an interpreter, who passed on the words to Tirkeq.
"This area was neglected by the old regime, and we consider what you are doing a sign of friendship," Tirkeq replied. "Thank you, thank you."
Tirkeq received the money on behalf of the village with the understanding that he would make sure residents who suffered losses are compensated. By making the payment in public, Marines hoped to ensure that he does.
Proof needed for payment Thursday was minimal: the word of village leaders, a story that seemed plausible, some face-to-face contact for reassurance.
"We're giving them the benefit of the doubt," said Marine Capt. Steve Coast, head of a civil affairs team.
The benefit of the doubt was needed most in the case of the man who said his daughter had been killed. Early in the discussions, villagers sought compensation for the man, who wasn't present. A resident was sent to fetch him, but returned alone. The Marines refused to pay.
Then, as the Marines were preparing to leave, a man approached Coughlin and, through the village leader, announced he was the father of the dead child. "Weren't you here the entire time?" Coughlin asked, in a slightly incredulous tone.
"No, no, no," Tirkeq said. "He is my friend. He just walked up here. He is the father."
Coughlin quickly polled other Marines and Westerners standing in the dusty courtyard near the chickens, cows, donkeys and sheep. "Did anybody see him before this?" he asked.
When the village leader had first discussed the dead child, there was a reference to a 6-year-old boy; the man identified as the father said the child was a 7-year-old girl. No account was made of the discrepancy.
In the end, the Marines took Tirkeq and the man at their word.
The outreach method for payments being practiced in the village is unusual. Most of those who say they lost relatives or property will be required to work through the Fallouja mayor's office; their claims will be vetted by an Iraqi judge before being presented to the Marines.
But the Marines have lavished extra attention on the villages around Fallouja. Although U.S. combat units have largely withdrawn from the city, Marines are still searching for insurgents and weapons smugglers in the outlying areas. Friendship with residents out here has a strategic value.
Marines believe the villages to have been neutral territory during the fight, with few of the area's young men joining the insurgency. Although the brunt of the fighting took place inside the city limits, there were skirmishes in the countryside, including nightly ambushes, which the Marines blame in part on "foreign fighters" from outside Iraq.
The village leader reminded Coughlin that residents had helped Marines when one of their tanks became bogged in the mud. "We are a peaceful village," he insisted.
The 1st Marine Regiment recently received $2.7 million to pay for structural damage done by the fighting. Commanders also can take money from their own budgets. Payments for deaths come from the Marine Corps' operations and maintenance budget.
Bahjat Ali Abed, a sad-eyed man in his 30s, said his father, Ali Abed Farham, was killed while driving near the Fallouja train station, a site of numerous skirmishes. He said the Marines later searched the slain man's car for weapons but found none.
On the hood of a mud-colored Humvee, as a curious crowd of men from the village pressed forward, Coughlin asked Abed to sign a document and offered an apology. And he offered a personal word, apparently trying to reach out to the Iraqi.
"I too lost my father not long ago," Coughlin said.
Abed did not reply but stepped back into the crowd, carefully counting 25 crisp $100 bills.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
Iraqis Hail Falluja 'Victory' as U.S. Changes Tack
Iraqis Hail Falluja 'Victory' as U.S. Changes Tack
from Saturday 01 May 2004
Videos Amplify Picture of Violence
This article describes many of the newly-leaked photos and videos from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. It also shows some of the pictures and a video. The video shows a soldier (it looks like Graner to me) smacking a deeply shaken prisoner, who is apparently being forced to strip.
May 20, 2004
Schneider: War Has Its Reasons
AEI - News & Commentary
War Has Its Reasons
By William Schneider
Posted: Wednesday, March 26, 2003
...
And so, reason No. 3 is ideology.
Influential neoconservatives, including Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, have been arguing for years in favor of an assertive U.S. strategy in the post-Cold War world. In 1997, they and other like-minded intellectuals organized the Project for the New American Century, which urged then-President Clinton to confront Iraq. "America was being too timid, too weak, and too unassertive in the post-Cold War world," Kristol argues. "American leadership was key to, not only world stability, but any hope for spreading democracy and freedom around the world."
Hartcher says, "This [war] is about the neoconservative view, the idealistic view, the Wilsonian view, that the world would be a better place if only America can make it that way." The neoconservatives advocate a paradigm shift in which the United States spreads American values by asserting American power-by force, if necessary.
The neoconservative champion is Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., now an ardent supporter of war with Iraq. "We must keep our nerve," McCain said last month, "have the courage to understand what our experiences have taught us, have faith in the necessity and rightness of our cause, and do what must be done to make this a safer, freer, better world."
Has Bush adopted their cause? Apparently. In his February 26 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, he said, "By the resolve and purpose of America and our friends and allies, we will make this an age of progress and liberty. Free people will set the course of history. And free people will keep the peace of the world."
It is a bold, ambitious, and risky agenda. But it just may be the real reason America is going to war.
May 19, 2004
The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
The New York Times > Week in Review > The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
May 18, 2004
Seymour Hersh: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
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.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. ...
May 15, 2004
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
You may have already heard about this.
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
An Islamist website claimed today that a group in Iraq affiliated with Al Qaeda had beheaded an American contractor to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. military jails.
In a video posted on the group's website and picked up by other news websites, Nick Berg, a 26-year-old communications businessman...
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked (washingtonpost.com)
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, joined by the foreign ministers of nations making key contributions of military forces in Iraq, emphatically said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after July 1, they would pack up without protest.
"We would leave," Powell said, noting that he was "not ducking the hypothetical, which I usually do," to avoid confusion on the extent of the new government's authority.
His statement, which was echoed by the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan, and by the U.S. administrator in Iraq, came one day after conflicting testimony on Capitol Hill by administration officials on the issue. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on Thursday, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman appeared to say that the interim government could order the departure of foreign troops, only to be contradicted by Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp, sitting at his side, who asserted that only an elected government could do so. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.
...
May 12, 2004
The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
Boston Globe / Op-ed / The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
by Ellen Goodman
MAYBE I SHOULDN'T be hard on the president for flunking his pop quiz on foreign policy. After all, it wasn't a take-home exam and he didn't have Dick Cheney by his side. But when a reporter at the prime-time news conference asked what errors he'd made and what lessons he learned, the president was stumped. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet," he said.
After another golly-gee-whiz stumble, he added, "you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."
Of course, if he needs a little help, I'm happy to share a few of the greatest hits from his bloopers reel. Mistakes? Howsabout them weapons of mass destruction? Howsabout the persistent links to nuclear weapons? Howsabout the connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Howsabout the "Mission Accomplished" speech or the idea that Iraqis would see us as liberators not occupiers? Anyone hear an "oops"?
In the aftermath, many called the president's refusal to admit mistakes a savvy political strategy: Strong men never say they're sorry. But I think there's something much more chilling going on. He truly doesn't believe he made any mistakes.
Last year, we launched a preemptive, unilateral war (OK, there are 60 New Zealanders, 230 Nicaraguans, and 27 soldiers from Kazakhstan, etc.) on the explicit grounds that Saddam was an imminent threat to our nation. Now the moral justification for this war has simply, seamlessly and without explanation morphed from defending ourselves to "changing the world."
The president said that even if he'd known then what he knows today, he would still have invaded Iraq. In an honest, passionate moment he proclaimed, "Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. . . . That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned."
But is that what the Senate felt called to do when it gave him the chit for war? Or the country?
It's not just that "weapons of mass destruction" have become "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities." The commander in chief has become the evangelist.
Remember when we disparaged George the Father for his breezy dismissal of "the vision thing"? What was he? A mere pragmatist. Well, George the Son has the vision thing in its pure tunnel form: The facts don't blur the fixed view.
In Texas, they talk about a man who is all hat and no cattle. But in Washington, we have a Texan who is all vision and no reality.
When another reporter asked the president how he got "it" -- the WMDs, our welcome as liberators -- so wrong, Bush stumbled again. Wrong isn't on his answer sheet because he's conflated two definitions of the same word: the wrong that's "incorrect" and the wrong that's "immoral." And if what he's done is moral it cannot be a mistake.
...
CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
The New York Times > News > CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An American soldier's video diary showing her disdain for Iraqi detainees who died in her charge is to be broadcast by a U.S. network on Wednesday in a further escalation of the prisoner abuse scandal that has shaken the Bush administration and provoked world outrage.
CBS, which two weeks ago broadcast the first pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, said on Tuesday its ``60 Minutes II'' program would show video footage depicting conditions there and at another U.S.-run prison in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca.
...
CBS said the home video did not show scenes of abuse but included comments by the soldier, whose name was not revealed to protect her identity, that make clear her dislike for the camp and the prisoners under her control.
``I hate it here,'' she said on the tape. ``I want to come home. I want to be a civilian again. We actually shot two prisoners today. One got shot in the chest for swinging a pole against our people on the feed team. One got shot in the arm. We don't know if the one we shot in the chest is dead yet.''
In her video, the soldier described the hazards of Camp Bucca. ``This is a sand viper,'' she said. ``One bite will kill you in six hours. We've already had two prisoners die of it, but who cares? That's two less for me to worry about.''
...
May 11, 2004
US tactics condemned by British officers
Telegraph | News | US tactics condemned by British officers
Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.
...
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
(permacopy)
The general from Saddam Hussein's army put in charge of the volatile city of Falluja challenged his U.S. backers Sunday, saying they were wrong to say foreign Islamic guerrillas were behind an insurgency there.
...
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
(permacopy)
The independent Army Times newspaper, read widely in the U.S. military, on Monday suggested Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilian and military leaders should be removed over the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal.
"This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential -- even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war," the private weekly newspaper said in an editorial.
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William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
...
So...the reason to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction is destroyed. The reason to go to war because of connections to September 11 is destroyed. The reason to go to war in order to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq is destroyed.
What is left? The one reason left has been unfailingly flapped around by defenders of this administration and supporters of this war: Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible man. He killed his own people. He tortured his own people. The Iraqis are better off without him, and so the war is justified.
And here, now, is the final excuse destroyed. We have killed more than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in this invasion, and maimed countless others. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison show that we, like Saddam Hussein, torture and humiliate the Iraqi people. Worst of all, we do this in the same prison Hussein used to do his torturing. The "rape rooms," often touted by Bush as justification for the invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the torturers now. We have achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of Baghdad.
This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but George W. Bush's ridiculous "War on Terror" as a whole.
I say ridiculous because this "War on Terror" was never, ever something we were going to win. What began on September 11 with the world wrapping us in its loving embrace has collapsed today in a literal orgy of shame and disgrace. This happened, simply, because of the complete failure of moral leadership at the highest levels.
...
British troops in torture scandal
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | British troops in torture scandal
(Permacopy)
The controversy over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners deepened last night when photographs were released apparently showing the torture of a PoW by a British soldier.
The Ministry of Defence launched an immediate investigation into the circumstances surrounding the photographs, in which a prisoner appears to be battered with rifle butts, threatened with execution and urinated on by his captors.
...
The photographs were given to the Mirror newspaper by serving soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, who told the paper that such acts of brutality against prisoners in Iraq were widespread.
The soldiers said the man, thought to be an alleged thief, was thrown off the back of a moving wagon after his eight-hour ordeal, and it is not known whether he lived or died.
...
Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed
CBS News | Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed | May 6, 2004 17:54:04
May 10, 2004
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
Excellent article.
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
May 09, 2004
May 08, 2004
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
by Jeof Oyster
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Browne: Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
by Harry Browne
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II: Weighing the Costs
May 07, 2004
Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
The New York Times > News > Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
Three U.S. military policemen who served at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison said on Thursday they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.
"It is a common thing to abuse prisoners," said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I saw beatings all the time.
"A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression."
...
A sergeant in their group was admonished last year after holding down a prisoner for other men to beat, both Leal and Sindar said. They said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as "camel jockey' or slogans such as "I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail."
Photos obtained by Reuters show U.S. soldiers looking into body bags of three Iraqi prisoners killed by 870th MP guards during a prison riot in the fall of 2003. One photograph shows a bearded man with much of his bloodied forehead removed by the force of a bullet.
"We were constantly being attacked, we had terrible support ... also being extended all the time, a lot of us had problems with our loved ones suffering from depression," said MP Dave Bischell. "It all contributes to the psychological component of soldiers when they get stressed."
When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.
"That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard," Leal said.
U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
The New York Times > News > U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
May 06, 2004
May 05, 2004
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
...
April 30, 2004
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
This page is an in-depth update on many aspects of the war, with extensive links to original sources.
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'
US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
US marines have agreed a framework plan to withdraw from the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja, says the local American military commander.
Lt Col Brennan Byrne said this would allow a newly created all-Iraqi force to take control of the city.
He said this would happen on Friday, but US defence officials in Washington denied knowledge of a firm deal.
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Deal to End Falluja Standoff Takes Shape; 10 Americans Die
FALLUJA, Iraq — American military officials said today that a new Iraqi security force made up of former Iraqi soldiers and commanders will replace the American troops now in Falluja and assume responsibility for the city's security.
The new force, known as the Falluja Protection Army, will include as many as 1,000 Iraqi soldiers led by a former general from the army of Saddam Hussein, American military officials said. A Marine commander, Col. Brennan Byrne, said the force will be a subordinate command of the American military, according to news services.
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April 28, 2004
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 27, 2004
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
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What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
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Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Marines Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stack
Marines Walk Softly and Carry a Big Stack
Armed with cash, U.S. troops attempt to make amends with Iraqi civilians who suffered.
By Tony Perry, Times Staff Writer
AL BO ALI DAKEL, Iraq — In accordance with the brutal accounting of modern combat, cash payments were made Thursday to people in this small village who suffered during recent fighting between U.S. Marines and insurgents in nearby Fallouja.
The village leader received $15,000 on behalf of residents in compensation for dead livestock, uprooted trees, damaged fields and other losses. The Marines tried to bargain him down to $10,000, but he stood firm.
The son of a man killed by gunfire while driving in a battle zone received $2,500. And a man who said his 7-year-old daughter was killed as she tended the family's sheep also received $2,500.
Now that the fighting between Marines and insurgents has tapered off in the area, the U.S. military is attempting to make amends with noncombatants who suffered. The Americans hope cash will win friends and help bring peace in this part of the volatile Sunni Triangle.
Under Marine rules, a payment for a death goes directly to the family. Payments for community losses can be funneled through an elder, sheik or village leader.
"I know we cannot replace your loss, but we would like to offer a small apology in the form of $2,500 so we can move on in friendship," Capt. Kevin Coughlin, judge advocate general for the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment, 1st Marine Division, told the man who said his daughter had been killed.
"I accept your apology," said Saady Mohamed Abdala.
Whether his daughter was killed by fire from Marines or insurgents — or whether the man even had a daughter — was not entirely clear.
"There's really no way to verify these accounts," Coughlin said. "It's really irrelevant. In making these payments, the U.S. is not taking responsibility for the loss, only offering an apology for a loss that occurred as a result of combat operations."
With a Marine disburser carrying a satchel with more than $80,000, Coughlin and a civil affairs team spent the afternoon combing rural villages just north of Fallouja, where Marines battled insurgents for weeks until handing over security in the city to an Iraq army unit early this month. Hundreds of civilians are believed to have been killed.
Under Marine Corps rules, the top payment a battalion can make for the loss of a family member is $2,500. There is no limit to the amount that can be paid for loss of possessions and livelihood, but the $15,000 paid to village leader Almas Tirkeq was considered on the high side.
That's a lot of cash to average Iraqis, in a land where unemployment is high, a private in the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps makes about $60 a month and a colonel less than $200.
Tirkeq, a large, ebullient man with a wide grin and ingratiating manner, had come prepared with an itemized list of losses, including two cows, five sheep, two donkeys, seven trees, several buildings and acres of farmland in this village of several thousand person.
"I hope this will better the lives of him and his people and we will be able to continue to work together," Coughlin told an interpreter, who passed on the words to Tirkeq.
"This area was neglected by the old regime, and we consider what you are doing a sign of friendship," Tirkeq replied. "Thank you, thank you."
Tirkeq received the money on behalf of the village with the understanding that he would make sure residents who suffered losses are compensated. By making the payment in public, Marines hoped to ensure that he does.
Proof needed for payment Thursday was minimal: the word of village leaders, a story that seemed plausible, some face-to-face contact for reassurance.
"We're giving them the benefit of the doubt," said Marine Capt. Steve Coast, head of a civil affairs team.
The benefit of the doubt was needed most in the case of the man who said his daughter had been killed. Early in the discussions, villagers sought compensation for the man, who wasn't present. A resident was sent to fetch him, but returned alone. The Marines refused to pay.
Then, as the Marines were preparing to leave, a man approached Coughlin and, through the village leader, announced he was the father of the dead child. "Weren't you here the entire time?" Coughlin asked, in a slightly incredulous tone.
"No, no, no," Tirkeq said. "He is my friend. He just walked up here. He is the father."
Coughlin quickly polled other Marines and Westerners standing in the dusty courtyard near the chickens, cows, donkeys and sheep. "Did anybody see him before this?" he asked.
When the village leader had first discussed the dead child, there was a reference to a 6-year-old boy; the man identified as the father said the child was a 7-year-old girl. No account was made of the discrepancy.
In the end, the Marines took Tirkeq and the man at their word.
The outreach method for payments being practiced in the village is unusual. Most of those who say they lost relatives or property will be required to work through the Fallouja mayor's office; their claims will be vetted by an Iraqi judge before being presented to the Marines.
But the Marines have lavished extra attention on the villages around Fallouja. Although U.S. combat units have largely withdrawn from the city, Marines are still searching for insurgents and weapons smugglers in the outlying areas. Friendship with residents out here has a strategic value.
Marines believe the villages to have been neutral territory during the fight, with few of the area's young men joining the insurgency. Although the brunt of the fighting took place inside the city limits, there were skirmishes in the countryside, including nightly ambushes, which the Marines blame in part on "foreign fighters" from outside Iraq.
The village leader reminded Coughlin that residents had helped Marines when one of their tanks became bogged in the mud. "We are a peaceful village," he insisted.
The 1st Marine Regiment recently received $2.7 million to pay for structural damage done by the fighting. Commanders also can take money from their own budgets. Payments for deaths come from the Marine Corps' operations and maintenance budget.
Bahjat Ali Abed, a sad-eyed man in his 30s, said his father, Ali Abed Farham, was killed while driving near the Fallouja train station, a site of numerous skirmishes. He said the Marines later searched the slain man's car for weapons but found none.
On the hood of a mud-colored Humvee, as a curious crowd of men from the village pressed forward, Coughlin asked Abed to sign a document and offered an apology. And he offered a personal word, apparently trying to reach out to the Iraqi.
"I too lost my father not long ago," Coughlin said.
Abed did not reply but stepped back into the crowd, carefully counting 25 crisp $100 bills.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
Iraqis Hail Falluja 'Victory' as U.S. Changes Tack
Iraqis Hail Falluja 'Victory' as U.S. Changes Tack
from Saturday 01 May 2004
Videos Amplify Picture of Violence
This article describes many of the newly-leaked photos and videos from the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal. It also shows some of the pictures and a video. The video shows a soldier (it looks like Graner to me) smacking a deeply shaken prisoner, who is apparently being forced to strip.
Schneider: War Has Its Reasons
AEI - News & Commentary
War Has Its Reasons
By William Schneider
Posted: Wednesday, March 26, 2003
...
And so, reason No. 3 is ideology.
Influential neoconservatives, including Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle, have been arguing for years in favor of an assertive U.S. strategy in the post-Cold War world. In 1997, they and other like-minded intellectuals organized the Project for the New American Century, which urged then-President Clinton to confront Iraq. "America was being too timid, too weak, and too unassertive in the post-Cold War world," Kristol argues. "American leadership was key to, not only world stability, but any hope for spreading democracy and freedom around the world."
Hartcher says, "This [war] is about the neoconservative view, the idealistic view, the Wilsonian view, that the world would be a better place if only America can make it that way." The neoconservatives advocate a paradigm shift in which the United States spreads American values by asserting American power-by force, if necessary.
The neoconservative champion is Sen. John McCain, R- Ariz., now an ardent supporter of war with Iraq. "We must keep our nerve," McCain said last month, "have the courage to understand what our experiences have taught us, have faith in the necessity and rightness of our cause, and do what must be done to make this a safer, freer, better world."
Has Bush adopted their cause? Apparently. In his February 26 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, he said, "By the resolve and purpose of America and our friends and allies, we will make this an age of progress and liberty. Free people will set the course of history. And free people will keep the peace of the world."
It is a bold, ambitious, and risky agenda. But it just may be the real reason America is going to war.
May 19, 2004
The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
The New York Times > Week in Review > The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
May 18, 2004
Seymour Hersh: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
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.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. ...
May 15, 2004
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
You may have already heard about this.
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
An Islamist website claimed today that a group in Iraq affiliated with Al Qaeda had beheaded an American contractor to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. military jails.
In a video posted on the group's website and picked up by other news websites, Nick Berg, a 26-year-old communications businessman...
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked (washingtonpost.com)
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, joined by the foreign ministers of nations making key contributions of military forces in Iraq, emphatically said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after July 1, they would pack up without protest.
"We would leave," Powell said, noting that he was "not ducking the hypothetical, which I usually do," to avoid confusion on the extent of the new government's authority.
His statement, which was echoed by the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan, and by the U.S. administrator in Iraq, came one day after conflicting testimony on Capitol Hill by administration officials on the issue. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on Thursday, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman appeared to say that the interim government could order the departure of foreign troops, only to be contradicted by Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp, sitting at his side, who asserted that only an elected government could do so. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.
...
May 12, 2004
The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
Boston Globe / Op-ed / The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
by Ellen Goodman
MAYBE I SHOULDN'T be hard on the president for flunking his pop quiz on foreign policy. After all, it wasn't a take-home exam and he didn't have Dick Cheney by his side. But when a reporter at the prime-time news conference asked what errors he'd made and what lessons he learned, the president was stumped. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet," he said.
After another golly-gee-whiz stumble, he added, "you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."
Of course, if he needs a little help, I'm happy to share a few of the greatest hits from his bloopers reel. Mistakes? Howsabout them weapons of mass destruction? Howsabout the persistent links to nuclear weapons? Howsabout the connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Howsabout the "Mission Accomplished" speech or the idea that Iraqis would see us as liberators not occupiers? Anyone hear an "oops"?
In the aftermath, many called the president's refusal to admit mistakes a savvy political strategy: Strong men never say they're sorry. But I think there's something much more chilling going on. He truly doesn't believe he made any mistakes.
Last year, we launched a preemptive, unilateral war (OK, there are 60 New Zealanders, 230 Nicaraguans, and 27 soldiers from Kazakhstan, etc.) on the explicit grounds that Saddam was an imminent threat to our nation. Now the moral justification for this war has simply, seamlessly and without explanation morphed from defending ourselves to "changing the world."
The president said that even if he'd known then what he knows today, he would still have invaded Iraq. In an honest, passionate moment he proclaimed, "Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. . . . That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned."
But is that what the Senate felt called to do when it gave him the chit for war? Or the country?
It's not just that "weapons of mass destruction" have become "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities." The commander in chief has become the evangelist.
Remember when we disparaged George the Father for his breezy dismissal of "the vision thing"? What was he? A mere pragmatist. Well, George the Son has the vision thing in its pure tunnel form: The facts don't blur the fixed view.
In Texas, they talk about a man who is all hat and no cattle. But in Washington, we have a Texan who is all vision and no reality.
When another reporter asked the president how he got "it" -- the WMDs, our welcome as liberators -- so wrong, Bush stumbled again. Wrong isn't on his answer sheet because he's conflated two definitions of the same word: the wrong that's "incorrect" and the wrong that's "immoral." And if what he's done is moral it cannot be a mistake.
...
CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
The New York Times > News > CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An American soldier's video diary showing her disdain for Iraqi detainees who died in her charge is to be broadcast by a U.S. network on Wednesday in a further escalation of the prisoner abuse scandal that has shaken the Bush administration and provoked world outrage.
CBS, which two weeks ago broadcast the first pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, said on Tuesday its ``60 Minutes II'' program would show video footage depicting conditions there and at another U.S.-run prison in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca.
...
CBS said the home video did not show scenes of abuse but included comments by the soldier, whose name was not revealed to protect her identity, that make clear her dislike for the camp and the prisoners under her control.
``I hate it here,'' she said on the tape. ``I want to come home. I want to be a civilian again. We actually shot two prisoners today. One got shot in the chest for swinging a pole against our people on the feed team. One got shot in the arm. We don't know if the one we shot in the chest is dead yet.''
In her video, the soldier described the hazards of Camp Bucca. ``This is a sand viper,'' she said. ``One bite will kill you in six hours. We've already had two prisoners die of it, but who cares? That's two less for me to worry about.''
...
May 11, 2004
US tactics condemned by British officers
Telegraph | News | US tactics condemned by British officers
Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.
...
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
(permacopy)
The general from Saddam Hussein's army put in charge of the volatile city of Falluja challenged his U.S. backers Sunday, saying they were wrong to say foreign Islamic guerrillas were behind an insurgency there.
...
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
(permacopy)
The independent Army Times newspaper, read widely in the U.S. military, on Monday suggested Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilian and military leaders should be removed over the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal.
"This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential -- even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war," the private weekly newspaper said in an editorial.
...
William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
...
So...the reason to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction is destroyed. The reason to go to war because of connections to September 11 is destroyed. The reason to go to war in order to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq is destroyed.
What is left? The one reason left has been unfailingly flapped around by defenders of this administration and supporters of this war: Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible man. He killed his own people. He tortured his own people. The Iraqis are better off without him, and so the war is justified.
And here, now, is the final excuse destroyed. We have killed more than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in this invasion, and maimed countless others. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison show that we, like Saddam Hussein, torture and humiliate the Iraqi people. Worst of all, we do this in the same prison Hussein used to do his torturing. The "rape rooms," often touted by Bush as justification for the invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the torturers now. We have achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of Baghdad.
This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but George W. Bush's ridiculous "War on Terror" as a whole.
I say ridiculous because this "War on Terror" was never, ever something we were going to win. What began on September 11 with the world wrapping us in its loving embrace has collapsed today in a literal orgy of shame and disgrace. This happened, simply, because of the complete failure of moral leadership at the highest levels.
...
British troops in torture scandal
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | British troops in torture scandal
(Permacopy)
The controversy over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners deepened last night when photographs were released apparently showing the torture of a PoW by a British soldier.
The Ministry of Defence launched an immediate investigation into the circumstances surrounding the photographs, in which a prisoner appears to be battered with rifle butts, threatened with execution and urinated on by his captors.
...
The photographs were given to the Mirror newspaper by serving soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, who told the paper that such acts of brutality against prisoners in Iraq were widespread.
The soldiers said the man, thought to be an alleged thief, was thrown off the back of a moving wagon after his eight-hour ordeal, and it is not known whether he lived or died.
...
Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed
CBS News | Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed | May 6, 2004 17:54:04
May 10, 2004
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
Excellent article.
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
May 09, 2004
May 08, 2004
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
by Jeof Oyster
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Browne: Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
by Harry Browne
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II: Weighing the Costs
May 07, 2004
Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
The New York Times > News > Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
Three U.S. military policemen who served at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison said on Thursday they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.
"It is a common thing to abuse prisoners," said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I saw beatings all the time.
"A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression."
...
A sergeant in their group was admonished last year after holding down a prisoner for other men to beat, both Leal and Sindar said. They said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as "camel jockey' or slogans such as "I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail."
Photos obtained by Reuters show U.S. soldiers looking into body bags of three Iraqi prisoners killed by 870th MP guards during a prison riot in the fall of 2003. One photograph shows a bearded man with much of his bloodied forehead removed by the force of a bullet.
"We were constantly being attacked, we had terrible support ... also being extended all the time, a lot of us had problems with our loved ones suffering from depression," said MP Dave Bischell. "It all contributes to the psychological component of soldiers when they get stressed."
When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.
"That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard," Leal said.
U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
The New York Times > News > U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
May 06, 2004
May 05, 2004
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
...
April 30, 2004
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
This page is an in-depth update on many aspects of the war, with extensive links to original sources.
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'
US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
US marines have agreed a framework plan to withdraw from the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja, says the local American military commander.
Lt Col Brennan Byrne said this would allow a newly created all-Iraqi force to take control of the city.
He said this would happen on Friday, but US defence officials in Washington denied knowledge of a firm deal.
...
Deal to End Falluja Standoff Takes Shape; 10 Americans Die
FALLUJA, Iraq — American military officials said today that a new Iraqi security force made up of former Iraqi soldiers and commanders will replace the American troops now in Falluja and assume responsibility for the city's security.
The new force, known as the Falluja Protection Army, will include as many as 1,000 Iraqi soldiers led by a former general from the army of Saddam Hussein, American military officials said. A Marine commander, Col. Brennan Byrne, said the force will be a subordinate command of the American military, according to news services.
...
April 28, 2004
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 27, 2004
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
The New York Times > Week in Review > The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts
Seymour Hersh: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.
Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-15
The roots of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal lie not in the criminal inclinations of a few Army reservists but in a decision, approved last year by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to expand a highly secret operation, which had been focussed on the hunt for Al Qaeda, to the interrogation of prisoners in Iraq. Rumsfeld’s decision embittered the American intelligence community, damaged the effectiveness of élite combat units, and hurt America’s prospects in the war on terror.
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.”
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness. One officer described him to me that fall as “kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors.” In November, the Washington Post reported that, as many as ten times since early October, Air Force pilots believed they’d had senior Al Qaeda and Taliban members in their sights but had been unable to act in time because of legalistic hurdles. There were similar problems throughout the world, as American Special Forces units seeking to move quickly against suspected terrorist cells were compelled to get prior approval from local American ambassadors and brief their superiors in the chain of command.
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. ...
May 15, 2004
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
You may have already heard about this.
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
An Islamist website claimed today that a group in Iraq affiliated with Al Qaeda had beheaded an American contractor to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. military jails.
In a video posted on the group's website and picked up by other news websites, Nick Berg, a 26-year-old communications businessman...
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked (washingtonpost.com)
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, joined by the foreign ministers of nations making key contributions of military forces in Iraq, emphatically said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after July 1, they would pack up without protest.
"We would leave," Powell said, noting that he was "not ducking the hypothetical, which I usually do," to avoid confusion on the extent of the new government's authority.
His statement, which was echoed by the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan, and by the U.S. administrator in Iraq, came one day after conflicting testimony on Capitol Hill by administration officials on the issue. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on Thursday, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman appeared to say that the interim government could order the departure of foreign troops, only to be contradicted by Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp, sitting at his side, who asserted that only an elected government could do so. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.
...
May 12, 2004
The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
Boston Globe / Op-ed / The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
by Ellen Goodman
MAYBE I SHOULDN'T be hard on the president for flunking his pop quiz on foreign policy. After all, it wasn't a take-home exam and he didn't have Dick Cheney by his side. But when a reporter at the prime-time news conference asked what errors he'd made and what lessons he learned, the president was stumped. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet," he said.
After another golly-gee-whiz stumble, he added, "you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."
Of course, if he needs a little help, I'm happy to share a few of the greatest hits from his bloopers reel. Mistakes? Howsabout them weapons of mass destruction? Howsabout the persistent links to nuclear weapons? Howsabout the connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Howsabout the "Mission Accomplished" speech or the idea that Iraqis would see us as liberators not occupiers? Anyone hear an "oops"?
In the aftermath, many called the president's refusal to admit mistakes a savvy political strategy: Strong men never say they're sorry. But I think there's something much more chilling going on. He truly doesn't believe he made any mistakes.
Last year, we launched a preemptive, unilateral war (OK, there are 60 New Zealanders, 230 Nicaraguans, and 27 soldiers from Kazakhstan, etc.) on the explicit grounds that Saddam was an imminent threat to our nation. Now the moral justification for this war has simply, seamlessly and without explanation morphed from defending ourselves to "changing the world."
The president said that even if he'd known then what he knows today, he would still have invaded Iraq. In an honest, passionate moment he proclaimed, "Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. . . . That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned."
But is that what the Senate felt called to do when it gave him the chit for war? Or the country?
It's not just that "weapons of mass destruction" have become "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities." The commander in chief has become the evangelist.
Remember when we disparaged George the Father for his breezy dismissal of "the vision thing"? What was he? A mere pragmatist. Well, George the Son has the vision thing in its pure tunnel form: The facts don't blur the fixed view.
In Texas, they talk about a man who is all hat and no cattle. But in Washington, we have a Texan who is all vision and no reality.
When another reporter asked the president how he got "it" -- the WMDs, our welcome as liberators -- so wrong, Bush stumbled again. Wrong isn't on his answer sheet because he's conflated two definitions of the same word: the wrong that's "incorrect" and the wrong that's "immoral." And if what he's done is moral it cannot be a mistake.
...
CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
The New York Times > News > CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An American soldier's video diary showing her disdain for Iraqi detainees who died in her charge is to be broadcast by a U.S. network on Wednesday in a further escalation of the prisoner abuse scandal that has shaken the Bush administration and provoked world outrage.
CBS, which two weeks ago broadcast the first pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, said on Tuesday its ``60 Minutes II'' program would show video footage depicting conditions there and at another U.S.-run prison in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca.
...
CBS said the home video did not show scenes of abuse but included comments by the soldier, whose name was not revealed to protect her identity, that make clear her dislike for the camp and the prisoners under her control.
``I hate it here,'' she said on the tape. ``I want to come home. I want to be a civilian again. We actually shot two prisoners today. One got shot in the chest for swinging a pole against our people on the feed team. One got shot in the arm. We don't know if the one we shot in the chest is dead yet.''
In her video, the soldier described the hazards of Camp Bucca. ``This is a sand viper,'' she said. ``One bite will kill you in six hours. We've already had two prisoners die of it, but who cares? That's two less for me to worry about.''
...
May 11, 2004
US tactics condemned by British officers
Telegraph | News | US tactics condemned by British officers
Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.
...
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
(permacopy)
The general from Saddam Hussein's army put in charge of the volatile city of Falluja challenged his U.S. backers Sunday, saying they were wrong to say foreign Islamic guerrillas were behind an insurgency there.
...
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
(permacopy)
The independent Army Times newspaper, read widely in the U.S. military, on Monday suggested Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilian and military leaders should be removed over the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal.
"This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential -- even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war," the private weekly newspaper said in an editorial.
...
William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
...
So...the reason to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction is destroyed. The reason to go to war because of connections to September 11 is destroyed. The reason to go to war in order to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq is destroyed.
What is left? The one reason left has been unfailingly flapped around by defenders of this administration and supporters of this war: Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible man. He killed his own people. He tortured his own people. The Iraqis are better off without him, and so the war is justified.
And here, now, is the final excuse destroyed. We have killed more than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in this invasion, and maimed countless others. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison show that we, like Saddam Hussein, torture and humiliate the Iraqi people. Worst of all, we do this in the same prison Hussein used to do his torturing. The "rape rooms," often touted by Bush as justification for the invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the torturers now. We have achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of Baghdad.
This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but George W. Bush's ridiculous "War on Terror" as a whole.
I say ridiculous because this "War on Terror" was never, ever something we were going to win. What began on September 11 with the world wrapping us in its loving embrace has collapsed today in a literal orgy of shame and disgrace. This happened, simply, because of the complete failure of moral leadership at the highest levels.
...
British troops in torture scandal
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | British troops in torture scandal
(Permacopy)
The controversy over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners deepened last night when photographs were released apparently showing the torture of a PoW by a British soldier.
The Ministry of Defence launched an immediate investigation into the circumstances surrounding the photographs, in which a prisoner appears to be battered with rifle butts, threatened with execution and urinated on by his captors.
...
The photographs were given to the Mirror newspaper by serving soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, who told the paper that such acts of brutality against prisoners in Iraq were widespread.
The soldiers said the man, thought to be an alleged thief, was thrown off the back of a moving wagon after his eight-hour ordeal, and it is not known whether he lived or died.
...
Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed
CBS News | Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed | May 6, 2004 17:54:04
May 10, 2004
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
Excellent article.
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
May 09, 2004
May 08, 2004
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
by Jeof Oyster
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Browne: Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
by Harry Browne
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II: Weighing the Costs
May 07, 2004
Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
The New York Times > News > Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
Three U.S. military policemen who served at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison said on Thursday they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.
"It is a common thing to abuse prisoners," said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I saw beatings all the time.
"A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression."
...
A sergeant in their group was admonished last year after holding down a prisoner for other men to beat, both Leal and Sindar said. They said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as "camel jockey' or slogans such as "I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail."
Photos obtained by Reuters show U.S. soldiers looking into body bags of three Iraqi prisoners killed by 870th MP guards during a prison riot in the fall of 2003. One photograph shows a bearded man with much of his bloodied forehead removed by the force of a bullet.
"We were constantly being attacked, we had terrible support ... also being extended all the time, a lot of us had problems with our loved ones suffering from depression," said MP Dave Bischell. "It all contributes to the psychological component of soldiers when they get stressed."
When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.
"That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard," Leal said.
U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
The New York Times > News > U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
May 06, 2004
May 05, 2004
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
...
April 30, 2004
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
This page is an in-depth update on many aspects of the war, with extensive links to original sources.
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'
US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
US marines have agreed a framework plan to withdraw from the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja, says the local American military commander.
Lt Col Brennan Byrne said this would allow a newly created all-Iraqi force to take control of the city.
He said this would happen on Friday, but US defence officials in Washington denied knowledge of a firm deal.
...
Deal to End Falluja Standoff Takes Shape; 10 Americans Die
FALLUJA, Iraq — American military officials said today that a new Iraqi security force made up of former Iraqi soldiers and commanders will replace the American troops now in Falluja and assume responsibility for the city's security.
The new force, known as the Falluja Protection Army, will include as many as 1,000 Iraqi soldiers led by a former general from the army of Saddam Hussein, American military officials said. A Marine commander, Col. Brennan Byrne, said the force will be a subordinate command of the American military, according to news services.
...
April 28, 2004
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 27, 2004
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
You may have already heard about this.
Video Shows Beheading of U.S. Civilian
An Islamist website claimed today that a group in Iraq affiliated with Al Qaeda had beheaded an American contractor to avenge the abuse of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. military jails.
In a video posted on the group's website and picked up by other news websites, Nick Berg, a 26-year-old communications businessman...
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked
Powell Says Troops Would Leave Iraq if New Leaders Asked (washingtonpost.com)
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, joined by the foreign ministers of nations making key contributions of military forces in Iraq, emphatically said yesterday that if the incoming Iraqi interim government ordered the departure of foreign troops after July 1, they would pack up without protest.
"We would leave," Powell said, noting that he was "not ducking the hypothetical, which I usually do," to avoid confusion on the extent of the new government's authority.
His statement, which was echoed by the foreign ministers of Britain, Italy and Japan, and by the U.S. administrator in Iraq, came one day after conflicting testimony on Capitol Hill by administration officials on the issue. Testifying before the House International Relations Committee on Thursday, Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman appeared to say that the interim government could order the departure of foreign troops, only to be contradicted by Lt. Gen. Walter Sharp, sitting at his side, who asserted that only an elected government could do so. Iraqi elections are scheduled for January.
...
The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
Boston Globe / Op-ed / The blunders of a president who doesn't know he made them
by Ellen Goodman
MAYBE I SHOULDN'T be hard on the president for flunking his pop quiz on foreign policy. After all, it wasn't a take-home exam and he didn't have Dick Cheney by his side. But when a reporter at the prime-time news conference asked what errors he'd made and what lessons he learned, the president was stumped. "I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet," he said.
After another golly-gee-whiz stumble, he added, "you just put me under the spot here and maybe I'm not as quick on my feet as I should be in coming up with one."
Of course, if he needs a little help, I'm happy to share a few of the greatest hits from his bloopers reel. Mistakes? Howsabout them weapons of mass destruction? Howsabout the persistent links to nuclear weapons? Howsabout the connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. Howsabout the "Mission Accomplished" speech or the idea that Iraqis would see us as liberators not occupiers? Anyone hear an "oops"?
In the aftermath, many called the president's refusal to admit mistakes a savvy political strategy: Strong men never say they're sorry. But I think there's something much more chilling going on. He truly doesn't believe he made any mistakes.
Last year, we launched a preemptive, unilateral war (OK, there are 60 New Zealanders, 230 Nicaraguans, and 27 soldiers from Kazakhstan, etc.) on the explicit grounds that Saddam was an imminent threat to our nation. Now the moral justification for this war has simply, seamlessly and without explanation morphed from defending ourselves to "changing the world."
The president said that even if he'd known then what he knows today, he would still have invaded Iraq. In an honest, passionate moment he proclaimed, "Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom. . . . That is what we have been called to do, as far as I'm concerned."
But is that what the Senate felt called to do when it gave him the chit for war? Or the country?
It's not just that "weapons of mass destruction" have become "weapons of mass destruction program-related activities." The commander in chief has become the evangelist.
Remember when we disparaged George the Father for his breezy dismissal of "the vision thing"? What was he? A mere pragmatist. Well, George the Son has the vision thing in its pure tunnel form: The facts don't blur the fixed view.
In Texas, they talk about a man who is all hat and no cattle. But in Washington, we have a Texan who is all vision and no reality.
When another reporter asked the president how he got "it" -- the WMDs, our welcome as liberators -- so wrong, Bush stumbled again. Wrong isn't on his answer sheet because he's conflated two definitions of the same word: the wrong that's "incorrect" and the wrong that's "immoral." And if what he's done is moral it cannot be a mistake.
...
CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
The New York Times > News > CBS to Air U.S. Soldier's Video Diary of Iraq Abuse
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An American soldier's video diary showing her disdain for Iraqi detainees who died in her charge is to be broadcast by a U.S. network on Wednesday in a further escalation of the prisoner abuse scandal that has shaken the Bush administration and provoked world outrage.
CBS, which two weeks ago broadcast the first pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, said on Tuesday its ``60 Minutes II'' program would show video footage depicting conditions there and at another U.S.-run prison in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca.
...
CBS said the home video did not show scenes of abuse but included comments by the soldier, whose name was not revealed to protect her identity, that make clear her dislike for the camp and the prisoners under her control.
``I hate it here,'' she said on the tape. ``I want to come home. I want to be a civilian again. We actually shot two prisoners today. One got shot in the chest for swinging a pole against our people on the feed team. One got shot in the arm. We don't know if the one we shot in the chest is dead yet.''
In her video, the soldier described the hazards of Camp Bucca. ``This is a sand viper,'' she said. ``One bite will kill you in six hours. We've already had two prisoners die of it, but who cares? That's two less for me to worry about.''
...
May 11, 2004
US tactics condemned by British officers
Telegraph | News | US tactics condemned by British officers
Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.
...
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
(permacopy)
The general from Saddam Hussein's army put in charge of the volatile city of Falluja challenged his U.S. backers Sunday, saying they were wrong to say foreign Islamic guerrillas were behind an insurgency there.
...
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
(permacopy)
The independent Army Times newspaper, read widely in the U.S. military, on Monday suggested Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilian and military leaders should be removed over the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal.
"This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential -- even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war," the private weekly newspaper said in an editorial.
...
William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
...
So...the reason to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction is destroyed. The reason to go to war because of connections to September 11 is destroyed. The reason to go to war in order to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq is destroyed.
What is left? The one reason left has been unfailingly flapped around by defenders of this administration and supporters of this war: Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible man. He killed his own people. He tortured his own people. The Iraqis are better off without him, and so the war is justified.
And here, now, is the final excuse destroyed. We have killed more than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in this invasion, and maimed countless others. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison show that we, like Saddam Hussein, torture and humiliate the Iraqi people. Worst of all, we do this in the same prison Hussein used to do his torturing. The "rape rooms," often touted by Bush as justification for the invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the torturers now. We have achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of Baghdad.
This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but George W. Bush's ridiculous "War on Terror" as a whole.
I say ridiculous because this "War on Terror" was never, ever something we were going to win. What began on September 11 with the world wrapping us in its loving embrace has collapsed today in a literal orgy of shame and disgrace. This happened, simply, because of the complete failure of moral leadership at the highest levels.
...
British troops in torture scandal
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | British troops in torture scandal
(Permacopy)
The controversy over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners deepened last night when photographs were released apparently showing the torture of a PoW by a British soldier.
The Ministry of Defence launched an immediate investigation into the circumstances surrounding the photographs, in which a prisoner appears to be battered with rifle butts, threatened with execution and urinated on by his captors.
...
The photographs were given to the Mirror newspaper by serving soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, who told the paper that such acts of brutality against prisoners in Iraq were widespread.
The soldiers said the man, thought to be an alleged thief, was thrown off the back of a moving wagon after his eight-hour ordeal, and it is not known whether he lived or died.
...
Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed
CBS News | Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed | May 6, 2004 17:54:04
May 10, 2004
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
Excellent article.
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
May 09, 2004
May 08, 2004
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
by Jeof Oyster
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Browne: Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
by Harry Browne
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II: Weighing the Costs
May 07, 2004
Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
The New York Times > News > Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
Three U.S. military policemen who served at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison said on Thursday they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.
"It is a common thing to abuse prisoners," said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I saw beatings all the time.
"A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression."
...
A sergeant in their group was admonished last year after holding down a prisoner for other men to beat, both Leal and Sindar said. They said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as "camel jockey' or slogans such as "I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail."
Photos obtained by Reuters show U.S. soldiers looking into body bags of three Iraqi prisoners killed by 870th MP guards during a prison riot in the fall of 2003. One photograph shows a bearded man with much of his bloodied forehead removed by the force of a bullet.
"We were constantly being attacked, we had terrible support ... also being extended all the time, a lot of us had problems with our loved ones suffering from depression," said MP Dave Bischell. "It all contributes to the psychological component of soldiers when they get stressed."
When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.
"That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard," Leal said.
U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
The New York Times > News > U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
May 06, 2004
May 05, 2004
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
...
April 30, 2004
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
This page is an in-depth update on many aspects of the war, with extensive links to original sources.
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'
US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
US marines have agreed a framework plan to withdraw from the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja, says the local American military commander.
Lt Col Brennan Byrne said this would allow a newly created all-Iraqi force to take control of the city.
He said this would happen on Friday, but US defence officials in Washington denied knowledge of a firm deal.
...
Deal to End Falluja Standoff Takes Shape; 10 Americans Die
FALLUJA, Iraq — American military officials said today that a new Iraqi security force made up of former Iraqi soldiers and commanders will replace the American troops now in Falluja and assume responsibility for the city's security.
The new force, known as the Falluja Protection Army, will include as many as 1,000 Iraqi soldiers led by a former general from the army of Saddam Hussein, American military officials said. A Marine commander, Col. Brennan Byrne, said the force will be a subordinate command of the American military, according to news services.
...
April 28, 2004
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 27, 2004
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
US tactics condemned by British officers
Telegraph | News | US tactics condemned by British officers
Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of "unease and frustration" among the British high command.
...
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
Saddam General in Falluja Questions U.S. Demands
(permacopy)
The general from Saddam Hussein's army put in charge of the volatile city of Falluja challenged his U.S. backers Sunday, saying they were wrong to say foreign Islamic guerrillas were behind an insurgency there.
...
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
Rumsfeld Criticized by Influential Military Paper
(permacopy)
The independent Army Times newspaper, read widely in the U.S. military, on Monday suggested Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Pentagon civilian and military leaders should be removed over the Iraq prisoner abuse scandal.
"This was not just a failure of leadership at the local command level. This was a failure that ran straight to the top. Accountability here is essential -- even if that means relieving top leaders from duty in a time of war," the private weekly newspaper said in an editorial.
...
William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | The War is Lost
...
So...the reason to go to war because of weapons of mass destruction is destroyed. The reason to go to war because of connections to September 11 is destroyed. The reason to go to war in order to bring freedom and democracy to Iraq is destroyed.
What is left? The one reason left has been unfailingly flapped around by defenders of this administration and supporters of this war: Saddam Hussein was a terrible, terrible man. He killed his own people. He tortured his own people. The Iraqis are better off without him, and so the war is justified.
And here, now, is the final excuse destroyed. We have killed more than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians in this invasion, and maimed countless others. The photos from Abu Ghraib prison show that we, like Saddam Hussein, torture and humiliate the Iraqi people. Worst of all, we do this in the same prison Hussein used to do his torturing. The "rape rooms," often touted by Bush as justification for the invasion, are back. We are the killers now. We are the torturers now. We have achieved a moral equivalence with the Butcher of Baghdad.
This war is lost. I mean not just the Iraq war, but George W. Bush's ridiculous "War on Terror" as a whole.
I say ridiculous because this "War on Terror" was never, ever something we were going to win. What began on September 11 with the world wrapping us in its loving embrace has collapsed today in a literal orgy of shame and disgrace. This happened, simply, because of the complete failure of moral leadership at the highest levels.
...
British troops in torture scandal
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | British troops in torture scandal
(Permacopy)
The controversy over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners deepened last night when photographs were released apparently showing the torture of a PoW by a British soldier.
The Ministry of Defence launched an immediate investigation into the circumstances surrounding the photographs, in which a prisoner appears to be battered with rifle butts, threatened with execution and urinated on by his captors.
...
The photographs were given to the Mirror newspaper by serving soldiers from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment, who told the paper that such acts of brutality against prisoners in Iraq were widespread.
The soldiers said the man, thought to be an alleged thief, was thrown off the back of a moving wagon after his eight-hour ordeal, and it is not known whether he lived or died.
...
Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed
CBS News | Abuse Of Iraqi POWs By GIs Probed | May 6, 2004 17:54:04
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
Excellent article.
It Was About "Regime Change" from the Get-Go
by Jacob G. Hornberger, founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation
May 09, 2004
May 08, 2004
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
by Jeof Oyster
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Browne: Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
by Harry Browne
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II: Weighing the Costs
May 07, 2004
Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
The New York Times > News > Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
Three U.S. military policemen who served at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison said on Thursday they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.
"It is a common thing to abuse prisoners," said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I saw beatings all the time.
"A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression."
...
A sergeant in their group was admonished last year after holding down a prisoner for other men to beat, both Leal and Sindar said. They said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as "camel jockey' or slogans such as "I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail."
Photos obtained by Reuters show U.S. soldiers looking into body bags of three Iraqi prisoners killed by 870th MP guards during a prison riot in the fall of 2003. One photograph shows a bearded man with much of his bloodied forehead removed by the force of a bullet.
"We were constantly being attacked, we had terrible support ... also being extended all the time, a lot of us had problems with our loved ones suffering from depression," said MP Dave Bischell. "It all contributes to the psychological component of soldiers when they get stressed."
When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.
"That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard," Leal said.
U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
The New York Times > News > U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
May 06, 2004
May 05, 2004
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
...
April 30, 2004
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
This page is an in-depth update on many aspects of the war, with extensive links to original sources.
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'
US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
US marines have agreed a framework plan to withdraw from the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja, says the local American military commander.
Lt Col Brennan Byrne said this would allow a newly created all-Iraqi force to take control of the city.
He said this would happen on Friday, but US defence officials in Washington denied knowledge of a firm deal.
...
Deal to End Falluja Standoff Takes Shape; 10 Americans Die
FALLUJA, Iraq — American military officials said today that a new Iraqi security force made up of former Iraqi soldiers and commanders will replace the American troops now in Falluja and assume responsibility for the city's security.
The new force, known as the Falluja Protection Army, will include as many as 1,000 Iraqi soldiers led by a former general from the army of Saddam Hussein, American military officials said. A Marine commander, Col. Brennan Byrne, said the force will be a subordinate command of the American military, according to news services.
...
April 28, 2004
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 27, 2004
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Photos From Iraq Prison Show We Are Our Own Worst Enemy
Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
t r u t h o u t - Philip Kennicott | A Wretched New Picture of America
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
Understandable Hate: The Iraqis' Inevitable Reaction
by Jeof Oyster
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
SF Chronicle: Rumsfeld warns of photos depicting worse abuses / ANALYSIS: Is the nation nearing turning point in support of war?
Browne: Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
Who's Responsible for the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse?
by Harry Browne
Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II
t r u t h o u t - Steve Weissman | Thank God for the Torturers -- Part II: Weighing the Costs
May 07, 2004
Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
The New York Times > News > Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
Three U.S. military policemen who served at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison said on Thursday they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.
"It is a common thing to abuse prisoners," said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I saw beatings all the time.
"A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression."
...
A sergeant in their group was admonished last year after holding down a prisoner for other men to beat, both Leal and Sindar said. They said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as "camel jockey' or slogans such as "I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail."
Photos obtained by Reuters show U.S. soldiers looking into body bags of three Iraqi prisoners killed by 870th MP guards during a prison riot in the fall of 2003. One photograph shows a bearded man with much of his bloodied forehead removed by the force of a bullet.
"We were constantly being attacked, we had terrible support ... also being extended all the time, a lot of us had problems with our loved ones suffering from depression," said MP Dave Bischell. "It all contributes to the psychological component of soldiers when they get stressed."
When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.
"That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard," Leal said.
U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
The New York Times > News > U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
May 06, 2004
May 05, 2004
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
...
April 30, 2004
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
This page is an in-depth update on many aspects of the war, with extensive links to original sources.
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'
US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
US marines have agreed a framework plan to withdraw from the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja, says the local American military commander.
Lt Col Brennan Byrne said this would allow a newly created all-Iraqi force to take control of the city.
He said this would happen on Friday, but US defence officials in Washington denied knowledge of a firm deal.
...
Deal to End Falluja Standoff Takes Shape; 10 Americans Die
FALLUJA, Iraq — American military officials said today that a new Iraqi security force made up of former Iraqi soldiers and commanders will replace the American troops now in Falluja and assume responsibility for the city's security.
The new force, known as the Falluja Protection Army, will include as many as 1,000 Iraqi soldiers led by a former general from the army of Saddam Hussein, American military officials said. A Marine commander, Col. Brennan Byrne, said the force will be a subordinate command of the American military, according to news services.
...
April 28, 2004
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 27, 2004
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
The New York Times > News > Soldiers Back in U.S. Tell of More Iraq Abuses
Three U.S. military policemen who served at Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison said on Thursday they had witnessed unreported cases of prisoner abuse and that the practice against Iraqis was commonplace.
"It is a common thing to abuse prisoners," said Sgt. Mike Sindar, 25, a National Guardsman with the 870th Military Police Company based in the San Francisco Bay area. "I saw beatings all the time.
"A lot of people had so much pent-up anger, so much aggression."
...
A sergeant in their group was admonished last year after holding down a prisoner for other men to beat, both Leal and Sindar said. They said they saw hooded prisoners with racial taunts written on the hoods such as "camel jockey' or slogans such as "I tried to kill an American but now I'm in jail."
Photos obtained by Reuters show U.S. soldiers looking into body bags of three Iraqi prisoners killed by 870th MP guards during a prison riot in the fall of 2003. One photograph shows a bearded man with much of his bloodied forehead removed by the force of a bullet.
"We were constantly being attacked, we had terrible support ... also being extended all the time, a lot of us had problems with our loved ones suffering from depression," said MP Dave Bischell. "It all contributes to the psychological component of soldiers when they get stressed."
When military investigators were looking into abuses several months ago, they gave U.S. guards a week's notice before inspecting their possessions, several soldiers said.
"That shows you how lax they are about discipline. 'We are going to look for contraband in here, so hint, hint, get rid of the stuff,' that's the way things work in the Guard," Leal said.
U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
The New York Times > News > U.S. Must Leave Falluja, Iraq General Says
May 05, 2004
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
...
April 30, 2004
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
This page is an in-depth update on many aspects of the war, with extensive links to original sources.
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'
US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
US marines have agreed a framework plan to withdraw from the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja, says the local American military commander.
Lt Col Brennan Byrne said this would allow a newly created all-Iraqi force to take control of the city.
He said this would happen on Friday, but US defence officials in Washington denied knowledge of a firm deal.
...
Deal to End Falluja Standoff Takes Shape; 10 Americans Die
FALLUJA, Iraq — American military officials said today that a new Iraqi security force made up of former Iraqi soldiers and commanders will replace the American troops now in Falluja and assume responsibility for the city's security.
The new force, known as the Falluja Protection Army, will include as many as 1,000 Iraqi soldiers led by a former general from the army of Saddam Hussein, American military officials said. A Marine commander, Col. Brennan Byrne, said the force will be a subordinate command of the American military, according to news services.
...
April 28, 2004
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 27, 2004
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The New York Times > International > Middle East > Iraqi Recounts Hours of Abuse by U.S. Troops
The shame is so deep that Hayder Sabbar Abd says he feels that he cannot move back to his old neighborhood. He would prefer not even to stay in Iraq. But now the entire world has seen the pictures, which Mr. Abd looked at yet again on Tuesday, pointing out the key figures, starting with three American soldiers wearing big smiles for the camera.
"That is Joiner," he said, pointing to one male soldier in glasses, a black hat and blue rubber gloves. His arms were crossed over a stack of naked and hooded Iraqi prisoners.
"That is Miss Maya," he said, pointing to a young woman's fresh face poking up over the same pile.
He gazed down at another picture. In it, a second female soldier flashed a "thumbs up" and pointed with her other hand at the genitals of a man wearing nothing but a black hood, his fingers laced on top of his head. He did not know her name. But the small scars on the torso left little doubt about the identity of the naked prisoner.
"That is me," he said, and he tapped his own hooded, slightly hunched image.
...
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
This page is an in-depth update on many aspects of the war, with extensive links to original sources.
New Iraq poll: US seen as an 'occupying force'
US soldiers are seen as 'uncaring, dangerous and lacking in respect.'
US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | US 'plans' to pull out of Falluja
US marines have agreed a framework plan to withdraw from the besieged Iraqi city of Falluja, says the local American military commander.
Lt Col Brennan Byrne said this would allow a newly created all-Iraqi force to take control of the city.
He said this would happen on Friday, but US defence officials in Washington denied knowledge of a firm deal.
...
Deal to End Falluja Standoff Takes Shape; 10 Americans Die
FALLUJA, Iraq — American military officials said today that a new Iraqi security force made up of former Iraqi soldiers and commanders will replace the American troops now in Falluja and assume responsibility for the city's security.
The new force, known as the Falluja Protection Army, will include as many as 1,000 Iraqi soldiers led by a former general from the army of Saddam Hussein, American military officials said. A Marine commander, Col. Brennan Byrne, said the force will be a subordinate command of the American military, according to news services.
...
April 28, 2004
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 27, 2004
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads
Marines Find Evidence of Suicide Squads (washingtonpost.com)
Excerpt:
"When I saw those [suicide] vests, I thought those people obviously don't value life," said one staff sergeant, shaking his head in bewilderment. A 20-year-old corporal, Philip Dennis, said he had expected to be building schools in Iraq, not dodging mortar shells.
"I'm a humanitarian person, and I don't believe in killing for no reason, but I guess this is the job that needs to be done," he said. On his first day of combat, Dennis recounted, he climbed onto a roof and was astonished to see dozens of black-robed insurgents with AK-47 rifles. "I had no idea they had so many people, and I realized this was very big." He paused and added, "We killed a lot of them."
April 24, 2004
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
April 14, 2004
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Raimondo: (Invading Iraq was) Worst Idea Ever
The Worst Idea, Ever
Invading Iraq, that is…
by Justin Raimondo
Antiwar.com
The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
Yahoo! News/Business Week - The Case for Leaving Iraq Pronto
President George W. Bush could not have been more emphatic in his remarks about Iraq before editors at the Newspaper Association of America's annual convention in Washington, D.C., on Apr. 21. "We're not going to cut and run if I'm in the Oval Office," Bush declared. Of course, the U.S. wouldn't cut and run even if Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) occupies the Oval Office in January, either. If anything, Kerry is even more adamant about bringing international help to police Iraq for years to come.
Here's one Presidential campaign issue Republicans and Democrats can agree on (the only exception: failed Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich of Ohio). Stay the course, they say. As the motivations and wisdom of the invasion are still hotly debated, leaving Iraq early, the argument goes, would be a dangerous sign of weakness that would embolden terrorists, abort the drive for political reform in the Arab world, and undermine U.S. credibility around the globe.
Yet at least one veteran geopolitical thinker, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Morris Abramowitz, wonders if all of this is just taken on faith, without adequate examination. He questions whether an early exit would be the disaster so widely assumed. It's one man's opinion, but it's worth pondering.
...
What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | What Colin Powell saw but didn't say
The rush to war in Iraq echoes Reagan's Iran-contra scandal
by Sidney Blumenthal
Scarce More Than Apes
Scarce More Than Apes
by Ryan McMaken
When any group of human beings gets in the way of imperialists, one can always be sure that the group of human beings in question will soon be demoted to some subclass of humanity.
In the nineteenth century, for example, during the period of reckless State expansion politely termed the era of Manifest Destiny, many American dreamers of empire found their plans being inconvenienced by the residents of New Spain living in the west. These Americans quickly found reasons to explain why the Southwest must be taken by force of arms as was eventually done in 1848. New England attorney Thomas Jefferson Farnham reasoned:
Thus much for the Spanish population of the Californias; in every way a poor apology of European extraction; as a general thing, incapable of reading or writing, and knowing nothing of science or literature, nothing of government but its brutal force, nothing of virtue but the sanction of the Church, nothing of religion but ceremonies of the national ritual…In a word, the Californians are an imbecile, pusillanimous race of men, and unfit to control the destinies of the beautiful country.
The Texan Noah Smithwick was more blunt when he declared that "I looked on the Mexicans as scarce more than apes." Yet, no one could have made the point better than one Santa Fe trader who remarked that Mexicans shouldn’t even be considered as part of "humanity" but as a separate race to be known as "Mexicanity."
While the roots of Anglo hatred of Spanish culture stretch back to Reformation England, it would be difficult to believe that Americans would have wasted their time even thinking about the question of subhuman Mexicans had their alleged inferiority not served the political purpose of convincing other Americans that the unconstitutional territorial expansion of the United States was essential in "liberating" a land enslaved by tyranny, primitivism, and superstition.
The American State and its servants have always been quite happy to endorse such sentiments, and today we are forced to endure the same rationalizing, lying, and stereotyping about Iraqis in order to save yet another race of men from themselves and to grant them the blessing of American "liberty" at the point of a bayonet. The Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Vietnamese, the Haitians, the Panamanians, and numerous others have all been saved in a similar fashion by the kind hand of American military might
Sadly, the modern conservative movement has been quite susceptible to this sort of wishful thinking about ready-made classifications for human beings that always seem – magically – to buttress government claims for increased power. The bogeyman these days of course is "Islamo-Fascism." Yet, if we were to take some old books about "the international Communist conspiracy" and replace "Communist" with "Islamo-Fascist" while updating some names and dates here and there, we would fine ourselves with a fine variety of timely new books on current events.
...
April 13, 2004
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
April 10, 2004
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
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Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
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Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Buchanan on Iraq: Is failure now an option?
WorldNetDaily: Is failure now an option?
by Pat Buchanan
Kathleen Parker: You say Fallujah, I say Rambo!
The below-linked (reckless, deplorable) article by Kathleen Parker is fairly well rebuked by Ryan McMaken in his piece "Scarce More Than Apes".
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
"We interrupt your self-indulgence"
By Paul Harris
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
The United Nations declared April 7, 2004 to be an international day of reflection on the genocide that killed in excess of 800,000 Rwandans 10 years ago. In the 13 weeks or so that followed April 6, 1994, the ruling Hutus slashed and slaughtered their way through the Tutsi community of Rwanda in a fit of killing that was even more prolific than the Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust.
Better than 8,000 people a day were being killed in some of the most barbaric and cruel acts ever visited by one man on another. Pregnant women were mutilated and their unborn children ripped from their wombs to be chopped into pieces. Bleeding bodies were pitched into latrines to die. No one was spared because of age or gender. Tutsis actually paid Hutus to shoot them and their families (the going rate was about $32 per person) to avoid being hacked to death by machete.
An international day of reflection … think about the dead, think about the inhumanity and brutality, think about the needless slaughter and the innocent victims.
But don’t think about why this catastrophe happened in the first place. Don’t think about the monumental gall of the U.N. to sanctimoniously urge the world to feel sorry about all this when it was the complete failure of the U.N.’s moral authority and its will to act that allowed these people to die in the first place. And don’t think about the fact that it was the recalcitrance of the United States who vetoed any moves by the Security Council to act. The U.S. forbade the U.N. to use the term "genocide" in 1994 because, under international law, acts of genocide require certain responses from the U.N. and the Americans were just not interested. Letting the Rwandans die was easier.
This crisis had its origins, as so many African crises have, in the residue of European colonialism. ...
April 09, 2004
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 05, 2004
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Patrick Sabatier: Rout
Editorial: Rout
By Patrick Sabatier
Liberation
(English translation from TruthOut)
Faced with uprisings that multiply, grow, and harden, the "coalition of the willing", that disembarked in Iraq in the wake of the US Army with flowers in their rifles, is revealing itself to be a "coalition of the irresolute." The Ukrainians have beaten a retreat. Japanese and South Koreans have gone to earth in their bases. Spaniards and Kazakhs wait for promised withdrawal. The Bulgarians cry for help. The Poles are asking themselves why they stay. The Italians negotiate with the enemy. All with the bitter certainty of having been swindled by the United States about the risks of the adventure as well as the reasons for embarking on it. ...
...
Bush is effectively counting on the UN (alas, too late) to get him out of a bad situation by legitimizing the Iraqi Authority to which some simulacrum of power is supposed to be transferred June 30 and by organizing elections on the heels of that transfer. He has begun to sound out the countries whose opposition to the war he derided- including France - to ask them to participate in a multinational force that would protect the UN in Iraq. One may imagine that these countries will think twice before jumping in to pull Bush out of the trap he fell into after having dug it himself.
April 02, 2004
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
March 28, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis
CNN.com - Slain contractor's brother doesn't blame Iraqis - Apr 2, 2004
FFF-- Iraq: One Year Later
Iraq: One Year Later
by Sheldon Richman, March 19, 2004
Islamist terrorism, the eradication of which President Bush listed among his reasons for invading Iraq, has now made its way to Spain. Good show, Mr. Bush. When he says the world is safer one year after the war, one must wonder which world he means.
...
Sen. Rockefeller on Iraq Vote: "I was wrong"
W. Va. Sen. on Iraq: 'My Vote Was Wrong'
CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP)--U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq.
``If I had known then what I know now, I would have voted against it,'' Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said Friday. ``I have admitted that my vote was wrong.''
The Democratic-led Senate approved the war resolution 77-23 on Oct. 11, 2002, one day after the U.S. House approved a similar resolution.
...
March 23, 2004
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
March 20, 2004
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Gorbachev Calls US-led War in Iraq a 'Great Mistake'
Excerpt:
"Democracy is not imposed with tanks and missiles, but with respect of other peoples and international law," Gorbachev said.
The war has also wounded US relations with traditional allies, the former Soviet leader said.
"Nobody doubts the economic, military and democratic power of the United States," he said. "We recognize this and that (Washington) can be a world leader. But we do not believe in leadership through domination."
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks
Former Bush Adviser: Rumsfeld Considered Iraq Bombings One Day After Terror Attacks - from TBO.com
(TruthOut permacopy - second story on page)
Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
Yahoo! News - Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11
(TruthOut permacopy)
March 18, 2004
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
March 06, 2004
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Yahoo! News - Poland 'taken for a ride' over Iraq's WMD: President
Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
ABCNEWS.com : Richard Perle Resigns From Advisory Panel
W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned.
Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday.
...
March 05, 2004
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 23, 2004
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
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Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
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Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
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Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
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Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
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As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
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The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
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Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
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...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
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Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
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Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
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Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
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Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
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Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
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Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
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Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
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"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
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Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blix: Iraq war was illegal
Blair's defence is bogus, says the former UN weapons inspector
By Anne Penketh in Stockholm and Andrew Grice
05 March 2004
The former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has declared that the war in Iraq was illegal, dealing another devastating blow to Tony Blair.
...
February 21, 2004
February 19, 2004
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
t r u t h o u t - Iraqi Guerillas Briefly Took Over Falluja Saturday
February 15, 2004
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
February 07, 2004
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
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Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
UN rules out early elections, warns Iraq against civil war
Scott Ritter: Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
HoustonChronicle.com - Not everyone got it wrong on Iraqi WMDs
We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's top weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and contradicting President Bush's pre-war claims to the contrary.
Despite the deaths of more than 525 American service members in Iraq, David Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find the expected weapons lies not with the president and his administration -- which had relentlessly pushed for war -- but rather with the U.S. intelligence community, which had, according to Kay, provided inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging data in a way that is to the president's political advantage. President Bush's decision to create an "independent commission" to investigate the intelligence failure reinforces this suspicion, since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes that made use of that data. More disturbing, the proposed commission's findings would be delayed until late fall, after the November 2004 presidential election.
The fact is, regardless of the findings of any commission, not everyone was wrong. I, for one, wasn't, having done my level best to demand facts from the Bush administration to back up its unsustained allegations regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and, failing that, speaking out and writing in as many forums as possible to educate the public in the United States and around the world about the looming danger of war based upon a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone....
...
I consider myself to be a reasonable person. Like Stu Cohen and the intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 Iraq NIE, I was intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data, collected from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services (including the CIA), and on the ground in Iraq by U.N. weapons inspectors, at least up until the time of my resignation from UNSCOM in August 1998. Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the respected journal of the Arms Control Association, to write a piece on the status of disarmament regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
That article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was published in June 2000 and received wide media coverage. The intelligence communities of the United States and Great Britain, however, dismissed its conclusions. But my finding that "because of the work carried out by UNSCOM, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at the time inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998" was an accurate assessment of the disarmament of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so than the CIA's 2002 NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analytical differences. Ray McGovern, who heads the nonprofit Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had Cohen taken the trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPS members over the past two years," McGovern said recently, he would have seen that "our writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that were indeed profoundly different -- even without having had access to what Stu calls the `totality of the information.' And Stu never indicated he thought us not `reasonable' -- at least back when many of us worked with him at CIA."
The fact is, Ray McGovern and I, and the scores of intelligence professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right. The Bush administration, in its rush toward war, ignored our advice and the body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation, exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD.
Sadly, no one listened.
February 05, 2004
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
February 03, 2004
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
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Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
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The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
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Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
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Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
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"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
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Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
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In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Nick Halfinger: How the Other Half Lives in Iraq
Excerpts:
For these reasons, myself and another journalist from the United States decide one day to go ahead and arrange ourselves a visit with the Occupation forces, while we still can, to provide the 'other side of the story'. We have yet to move amongst ordinary American soldiers, and so we set up to be 'embedded' at a place called Logistical Staging Area Anaconda.
L.S.A. Anaconda is situated sixty kilometers north of Baghdad, on the site of what was formerly an Iraqi airbase under Saddam. It has been appropriated by the US Army, and they have moved into the old hangars, mess halls, and offices as if it were their own construction.
...
Not much happens for several hours. The atmosphere, to us visitors, is stifling and slightly uncomfortable. Not that anyone there is unpleasant, it's just that they are all career soldiers, conservative politically and somewhat narrow in world-view. We are also trying to watch what we say, as we don't want anyone to overhear our real opinions about what's going on in Iraq, which we absolutely have a better understanding of than these folks, the majority of whom have spent an entire year on this one patch of ground without going "outside the wire", as leaving the base is called.
One woman tells us about all the media that have already visited. "The Guardian from England was here," she says, "that's why we don't always trust journalists. They wrote about 'Iraqi resistance fighters' ". She rolls her eyes, incredulous that they would use such language to describe people that she believes are all "Saddam Loyalists".
In fact, everyone we talk to at the base thinks of the resistance in Iraq as being monolithic, an army of lunatics bent on returning Iraq to Saddam Hussein. This runs counter to everything we hear on the street in Baghdad, where it is common knowledge that there are religious groups, straight-up nationalists, and generally angry people that all take part in attacking American troops, in addition to the former Baathists. L.S.A. Anaconda is indeed a different world from the one that we have been living in.
...
Like everyone else we meet at L.S.A. Anaconda, the therapist is amazed that we move about in Iraq so freely, without weapons or security. She has been "in country" a whole year, without leaving the base. When we tell her that if a military convoy can't take us back to Baghdad, that we may return by taxi, she almost falls out of her chair. "You can do that?" she exclaims. "Sure," replies my associate. "I once took a bus all the way to Mosul."
...
Basically, life at the base seems like what every one of my friends who joined the Army after high- school described to me: an oppressive, thankless life, overworked and underpaid, the only thing holding you together being the people around you, with whom you develop incredibly strong bonds. Other than that it totally sucks, and war makes it even worse.
Fuck this. We're going back to Baghdad, back to the real world, back to Iraq.
Nick Halfinger is the pen name of a freelance filmmaker working in Iraq.
January 24, 2004
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
January 18, 2004
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Iraqi civil war looms, CIA warns Bush, aides
Farah: Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Ethnic Cleansing, Palestinian Style
Jewish Press - By Joseph Farah
Blast in Baghdad Kills at Least 20 Outside U.S. Post
January 17, 2004
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
January 10, 2004
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Newsweek-- Refereeing in Hell
MSNBC - Refereeing in Hell
TruthOut permalink
GIs are dying. Rival factions are turning on each other. After freeing Iraq, can we keep it from coming apart?
December 28, 2003
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
December 27, 2003
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Fight to the death: the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more
You should read this article.
Fight to the death
(TruthOut permacopy)
December 20, 2003
Paul McGeough reports from Baghdad on the Iraqis who hated Saddam, but who hate the Americans more.
Day of Coordinated Attacks in Iraq
Coalition Forces Attacked in Southern Iraq
(TruthOut permacopy)
KARBALA, Iraq (AP) -- Insurgents using car bombs, mortars and machine guns launched three coordinated attacks in the southern city of Karbala on Saturday, killing 11 people -- including six Iraqi police officers and four coalition soldiers, military and hospital officials said. Two of the four coalition dead were from Thailand. An Iraqi civilian also was killed.
The attacks also wounded at least 172 people, with U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt saying 37 of them were coalition soldiers, including five Americans. Some 135 Iraqi police officers and civilians also were wounded, said Ali al-Arzawi, deputy head of Karbala General Hospital.
December 21, 2003
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
December 20, 2003
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
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Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
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Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
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The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
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Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
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...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
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Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
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He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
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Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
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Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
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Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
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"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
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Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
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In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Harry Browne on The Liberation of Iraq
How Do I Liberate Thee?
Let Me Count the Ways
by Harry Browne
December 15, 2003
Excerpts:
How has Iraq been liberated? Let me count the ways . . .
1. The country is occupied by a foreign power.
2. Its officials are appointed by that foreign power.
3. Its citizens must carry ID cards.
4. They must submit to searches of their persons and cars at checkpoints and roadblocks.
5. They must be in their homes by curfew time.
6. Many towns are ringed with barbed wire.
...
9. The occupiers have decreed that certain electoral outcomes won't be permitted.
...
11. Protests are outlawed.
12. Private homes are raided or demolished — with no due process of law.
...
14. Newspapers, radio stations, and TV are all supervised by the occupiers.
...
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor
'Sick' Saddam drugged: visitor (December 20, 2003)
A STARTLING new photograph of a sick-looking Saddam Hussein suggests he is being drugged or given strong medication by his US captors.
The man who took the photo told The Weekend Australian last night Hussein appeared very sick when he was visited by Iraqi Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi two days after being captured near Tikrit.
...
Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
This article is extracted from the Washington Times' "In the Ring" column
t r u t h o u t - Intelligence Report: Iraq Outlook Bleak
The National Intelligence Council, a group under CIA Director George J. Tenet, has released a paper that is part of an effort by intelligence analysts to predict global events in the next 17 years.
For its Middle East section, one analyst predicts Iraq faces a broad range of outcomes, mostly bad. ...
William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | We Caught The Wrong Guy
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
Coalition Strike In Afghanistan Kills 9 Children
(for-pay archive)
December 19, 2003
December 15, 2003
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
December 07, 2003
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
December 05, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
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Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
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Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
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Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
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Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
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Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
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Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
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The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
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Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
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Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
Boots on the Ground, Hearts on Their Sleeves
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 2, 2003
Rumsfeld's Leaked Memo about the "War on Terror"
I tried to find this memo when it was hot news, and gave up before I was able to. But I recently found cause to look again, and had better luck. I'm storing it here because it's worth archiving (Plus it's public domain, I assume, so I might as well get the traffic instead of USATODAY, where I got it from.)
October 16, 2003
TO: Gen. Dick Myers
Paul Wolfowitz
Gen. Pete Pace
Doug Feith
FROM: Donald Rumsfeld
SUBJECT: Global War on Terrorism
The questions I posed to combatant commanders this week were: Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror? Is DoD changing fast enough to deal with the new 21st century security environment? Can a big institution change fast enough? Is the USG changing fast enough?
DoD has been organized, trained and equipped to fight big armies, navies and air forces. It is not possible to change DoD fast enough to successfully fight the global war on terror; an alternative might be to try to fashion a new institution, either within DoD or elsewhere — one that seamlessly focuses the capabilities of several departments and agencies on this key problem.
With respect to global terrorism, the record since Septermber 11th seems to be:
We are having mixed results with Al Qaida, although we have put considerable pressure on them — nonetheless, a great many remain at large.
USG has made reasonable progress in capturing or killing the top 55 Iraqis.
USG has made somewhat slower progress tracking down the Taliban — Omar, Hekmatyar, etc.
With respect to the Ansar Al-Islam, we are just getting started.
Have we fashioned the right mix of rewards, amnesty, protection and confidence in the US?
Does DoD need to think through new ways to organize, train, equip and focus to deal with the global war on terror?
Are the changes we have and are making too modest and incremental? My impression is that we have not yet made truly bold moves, although we have have made many sensible, logical moves in the right direction, but are they enough?
Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?
Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions.
Do we need a new organization?
How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?
Is our current situation such that "the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog.
Does CIA need a new finding?
Should we create a private foundation to entice radical madradssas to a more moderate course?
What else should we be considering?
Please be prepared to discuss this at our meeting on Saturday or Monday.
Thanks.
December 03, 2003
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
December 01, 2003
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Some Iraqis Welcome Bush, Others Wish Him in Hell
This article is archived at TruthOut. The original doesn't appear to be available at MSNBC.com anymore.
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
The Pentagon crosses the lexicon
As the horizon in Iraq recedes, the U.S. military’s language adapts
ANALYSIS
By Michael Moran
MSNBC
The turkey has landed
The turkey has landed: how Bush cooked up a secret mission to give thanks to his troops
By Phil Reeves in Baghdad and David Usborne in New York
The Independent-UK
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
AlterNet: Neocons Leak Bad Intelligence
By Jim Lobe, AlterNet
November 20, 2003
The leak of a secret memorandum written by a senior Pentagon official reveals less about the connection between Saddam and al Qaeda than the growing desperation of neo-conservative hawks in the Bush administration.
November 30, 2003
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
November 14, 2003
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
'We could lose this situation'
'We could lose this situation'
· CIA says insurgents now 50,000 strong
· Crisis talks over transfer of power
Julian Borger in Washington and Rory McCarthy in Baghdad
Thursday November 13, 2003
The Guardian
The White House yesterday drew up emergency plans to accelerate the transfer of power in Iraq after being shown a devastating CIA report warning that the guerrilla war was in danger of escalating out of US control.
The report, an "appraisal of situation" commissioned by the CIA director, George Tenet, and written by the CIA station chief in Baghdad, said that the insurgency was gaining ground among the population, and already numbers in the tens of thousands.
One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents' strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had led the administration to believe.
An intelligence source in Washington familiar with the CIA report described it as a "bleak assessment that the resistance is broad, strong and getting stronger".
"It says we are going to lose the situation unless there is a rapid and dramatic change of course," the source said.
"There are thousands in the resistance - not just a core of Ba'athists. They are in the thousands, and growing every day. Not all those people are actually firing, but providing support, shelter and all that."
...
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
U.S. Kills 46 Iraqi Fighters in the North
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: November 30, 2003
Filed at 5:25 p.m. ET
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the deadliest reported firefight since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, U.S. soldiers fought back coordinated attacks Sunday using tanks, cannons and small arms in running battles throughout the northern city of Samarra. The troops killed 46 Iraqi fighters, and five Americans were wounded.
Minutes later, two South Korean contractors were killed nearby in a roadside ambush in what U.S. officials called a new campaign aimed at undermining international support for the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. Attacks on Saturday killed seven Spaniards, two Japanese diplomats and a Colombian oil worker.
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
Guerrilla war in Iraq spreading
US says attacks on rise outside Sunni Triangle
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 11/29/2003
WASHINGTON -- The guerrilla war in Iraq has moved steadily beyond the so-called Sunni Triangle and into areas of the country once considered peaceful, a potentially ominous development for security forces trying to restore order in the country.
Since the end of major combat operations on May 1, nearly 40 percent of attacks on US and coalition targets have been outside the Sunni Triangle, home to many remnants of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's regime, according to internal Defense Department reports obtained by the Globe.
The monthly breakdown is classified, but Defense Department officials confirmed that the number of attacks occurring in the far north, south, and far western Iraq -- areas outside the Sunni Triangle, which is immediately north and west of the capital of Baghdad -- has increased in recent months.
...
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed first 3 years of Vietnam
U.S. war dead in Iraq exceed early Vietnam years
Thu 13 November, 2003 22:38
By David Morgan
PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - The U.S. death toll in Iraq has surpassed the number of American soldiers killed during the first three years of the Vietnam War, the brutal Cold War conflict that cast a shadow over U.S. affairs for more than a generation.
A Reuters analysis of U.S. Defence Department statistics showed on Thursday that the Vietnam War, which the Army says officially began on December 11, 1961, produced a combined 392 fatal casualties from 1962 through 1964, when American troop levels in Indochina stood at just over 17,000.
By comparison, a roadside bomb attack that killed a soldier in Baghdad on Wednesday brought to 397 the tally of American dead in Iraq, where U.S. forces currently number about 130,000 troops -- the same number reached in Vietnam by October 1965.
...
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 35%
November 13, 2003
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
November 12, 2003
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Ted Rall-- Iraq From the Other Side: WHY WE FIGHT
I'm posting the full text of this not because I'm a big fan of it, but because I suspect that the news sites will be pressured to remove it from their sites, and might give in to that pressure. I'm not going to endorse Ted Rall's extremely controversial column, but I think it's worth reading, and I think he has the right to write it.
WHY WE FIGHT
Iraq From the Other Side
Tue Nov 11, 7:58 PM ET
By UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE/TED RALL
NEW YORK--Dear Recruit:
Thank you for joining the Iraqi resistance forces. You have been issued an AK-47 rifle, rocket-propelled grenade launcher and an address where you can pick up supplies of bombs and remote-controlled mines. Please let your cell leader know if you require additional materiel for use against the Americans.
You are joining a broad and diverse coalition dedicated to one principle: Iraq for Iraqis. Our leaders include generals of President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s secular government as well as fundamentalist Islamists. We are Sunni and Shia, Iraqi and foreign, Arab and Kurdish. Though we differ on what kind of future our country should have after liberation and many of us suffered under Saddam, we are fighting side by side because there is no dignity under the brutal and oppressive jackboot of the U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority or their Vichyite lapdogs on the Governing Council, headed by embezzler Ahmed Chalabi.
Because we destroyed our weapons of mass destruction, we were unable to defend ourselves against the American invasion. This was their plan all along. Now our only option is guerilla warfare: we must kill as many Americans as possible at a minimum risk to ourselves. As the Afghan resistance to the Soviets and the Americans' own revolution against our former colonial masters the British have proven, it will only be a matter of time before the U.S. occupation forces become demoralized. As casualties and expenditures rise, the costs will outweigh the economic and political benefits of occupation. Soon the American public will note that the anticipated five-year price tag of $500 billion, with a probable loss of some 4,000 lives and 10,000 wounded, is not a reasonable price to pay to get our 2.5 million barrels of oil flowing to the West each month. This net increase, of just 0.23 percent of total OPEC (news - web sites) production, will not reduce U.S. gasoline prices. At an average of 35 attacks each day, an hour does not pass without an American soldier coming under fire somewhere in Iraq. Ultimately the American public will pressure their leaders to withdraw their harried troops from our country.
It is inevitable. Our goal is to make that day come sooner rather than later.
It is no easy thing to shoot or blow up young men and women because they wear American uniforms. Indeed, the soldiers are themselves oppressed members of America's vast underclass. Many don't want to be here; joining America's mercenary army is the only way they can afford to attend university. Others, because they are poor and uneducated, do not understand that they are being used as pawns in Dick Cheney's cynical oil war.
Unfortunately, we can't help these innocent U.S. soldiers. They are victims, like ourselves, of the bandits in Washington. Nor can we disabuse them of the propaganda that an occupier isn't always an oppressor. We regret their deaths, but we must continue to kill them until the last one has gone home to America.
In recent months we have opened a second front, against such non-governmental organizations as the United Nations (news - web sites) and Red Crescent. A typical response of the Bush junta to these actions was issued by National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice: "It is unfortunate in the extreme that the terrorists decided to go after innocent aid workers and people who were just trying to help the Iraqi people." Do not listen to her. True, many aid workers are well intentioned. However, their presence under American military occupation tacitly endorses the invasion and subsequent colonization of Iraq. Their efforts to restore "normalcy" deceives weak-willed Iraqi civilians and international observers into the mistaken belief that the Americans are popular here. There can be no normalcy, or peace, until the invader is driven from our land. From the psychological warfare standpoint, the NGOs represent an even more insidious threat to fight for sovereignty than the U.S. army.
In this vein we must also take action against our own Iraqi citizens who choose to collaborate with the enemy. Bush wants to put an "Iraqi face" on the occupation. If we allow the Americans to corrupt our friends and neighbors by turning them into puppet policemen and sellouts, our independence will be lost forever. If someone you know is considering taking a job with the Americans, tell him that he is engaging in treason and encourage him to seek honest work instead. If he refuses, you must kill him as a warning to other weak-minded individuals.
Take to heart this warning of Cuban revolutionary Ché Guevara: "The guerrilla fighter needs full help from the people of the area. This is an indispensable condition. This is clearly seen by considering the case of bandit gangs that operate in a region. They have all the characteristics of a guerrilla army: homogeneity, respect for the leader, valor, knowledge of the ground, and, often, even good understanding of the tactics to be employed. The only thing missing is support of the people; and, inevitably, these gangs are captured and exterminated by the public force." If the Americans are right about us, and we enjoy no popular support, we deserve to be annihilated. Fortunately, the U.S. has adopted Israeli-style retaliatory bombing, cordoning off whole villages and other tactics that are turning civilian fence-sitters to our point of view.
To victory!
(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.)
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 2%
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
Deadliest Strike on U.S. Troops in Iraq Comes After 'Tough Week'
The Associated Press
Sunday 02 November 2003
Fallujah, Iraq - Insurgents shot down a Chinook helicopter with dozens of American troops on board Sunday, killing 15 and wounding 21 in the deadliest strike against U.S. forces since the war began -- a sign of the increasing sophistication of Iraq's elusive anti-U.S. fighters.
The giant helicopter was ferrying the soldiers on their way for leave outside Iraq when, witnesses told The Associated Press, two missiles streaked into the sky, fired from a date palm grove, and slammed into the rear of the aircraft. It crashed in flames in farmers' fields west of Baghdad.
It was the deadliest day for U.S. troops since March 23 -- the first week of the invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein -- and a major escalation in the campaign to drive the U.S.-led coalition out of the country.
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
Leaked Memo Exposes Rumsfeld's Doubts About War on Terror
By Julian Borger
The Guardian
Thursday 23 October 2003
The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has admitted that Washington has no way of knowing whether it is winning or losing its "war on terror" and predicts "a long, hard slog" in Iraq and Afghanistan, in a leaked document published yesterday.
The memorandum was sent to his civilian deputies and top military officers, calling for fresh thinking in US counter-terrorist strategy. Its sober tone is a marked contrast to the upbeat assessments offered to the public by President Bush and his administration officials.
The memo was published yesterday by the USA Today newspaper, and a Pentagon official confirmed its authenticity to the Guardian, describing it as one of Mr Rumsfeld's "snowflakes" (Pentagon slang for the daily blizzard of notes he sends to his subordinates).
Yesterday's memo is addressed to Mr Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, his chief policy adviser, Doug Feith, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Dick Myers, and his deputy, General Pete Pace, and it runs through a scorecard of US military engagements to date.
...
The Rumsfeld memo was leaked a few days after Mr Wolfowitz told supporters "we are winning" in Iraq. On Monday Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, told a Republican fund-raising meeting: "We are rolling back the terrorist threat at the very heart of its power, in the Middle East."
But Mr Rumsfeld warns: "The US is putting relatively little effort into a long-range plan, but we are putting a great deal of effort into trying to stop terrorists. The cost-benefit ratio is against us! Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 45%
November 09, 2003
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
November 07, 2003
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Jessica Lynch: Military manipulated story
Lynch: Military manipulated story
PALESTINE, W.Va., Nov. 7 -- Former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch said the U.S. military was wrong to manipulate the story of her dramatic rescue and should not have filmed it in the first place.
THE 20-YEAR-OLD private told ABC's Diane Sawyer in a "Primetime" interview to air Tuesday that she was bothered by the military's portrayal of her ordeal.
"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," she said in an excerpt from the interview, posted Friday on the network's Web site. "It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about," she said.
She also said there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed. “It’s wrong,” she said.
The former Army supply clerk suffered broken bones and other injuries when her maintenance convoy was attacked in the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah on March 23. U.S. forces rescued Lynch at a Nasiriyah hospital April 1.
‘I DID NOT SHOOT’
Early reports had Lynch fighting her attackers until she ran out of ammunition and suffering knife and bullet wounds. Military officials later acknowledged that Lynch wasn’t shot, but was hurt after her Humvee utility vehicle was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed into another vehicle.
Lynch told Sawyer she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that her gun jammed during the chaos. “I’m not about to take credit for something I didn’t do,” she said.
“I did not shoot, not a round, nothing ... I went down praying to my knees. And that’s the last I remember.”
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .05
Learning Percentage: 44%
The Vietnam War on HistoryChannel.com
HistoryChannel.com: VIETNAM WAR
Here's what I found to be the most compelling portion, considering current events (and current events yet to come):
The U.S. response to Vietnamese communism was essentially to apply a military solution to an internal political problem. America's infliction of enormous destruction on Vietnam served only to discredit politically the Vietnamese that the United States sought to assist. Furthermore, U.S. leaders underestimated the tenacity of the enemy. For the Vietnamese communists, the struggle was a total war for their own and their cause's survival. For the United States, it was a limited war. Despite U.S. concern about global credibility, Vietnam was a peripheral theater of the cold war. For many Americans, the ultimate issue in Vietnam was not a question of winning or losing. Rather, they came to believe that the rising level of expenditure of lives and dollars was unacceptable in pursuit of a marginal national objective.
The rhetoric of U.S. leaders after World War II about the superiority of American values, the dangers of appeasement, and the challenge of godless communism recognized no limit to U.S. ability to meet the test of global leadership. In reality, neither the United States nor any other nation had the power to guarantee alone the freedom and security of peoples of the world. The Vietnam War taught Americans a humbling lesson about the limits of power.
The domestic consequences of the war were equally profound. From Truman through Nixon, the war demonstrated the increasing dominance of the presidency within the federal government. Congress essentially defaulted to the "imperial presidency" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Vietnam also destroyed credibility within the American political process. The public came to distrust its leaders, and many officials distrusted the public. In May 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four Kent State University students during a protest over U.S. troops invading Cambodia. Many Americans were outraged while others defended the Ohio authorities. As this tragic example reveals, the war rent the fabric of trust that traditionally clothed the American polity. Vietnam figured prominently in inflation, unfulfilled Great Society programs, and the generation gap. The Vietnam War brought an end to the domestic consensus that had sustained U.S. cold war policies since World War II and that had formed the basis for the federal government's authority since the sweeping expansion of that authority under Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
Was Jose Couso's Death in Iraq a War Crime?
By Martine Silber
Le Monde
Monday 20 October 2003
"It's a small victory", David Couso declared when he learned that the judge in the Spanish National Audience had agreed to admit the family's complaint for a "war crime" against three soldiers of the United States Army's Third Infantry Division. His brother, José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish private television station Telecinco, was killed along with Taras Protsyuk, a journalist from the American agency, Reuters, April 8 in Baghdad, after an American Army tank opened fire on the Palestine Hotel where the majority of the international press was staying.
...
Full story (in French)...
TruthOut permacopy/English translation
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
(Form) Letters Home from Iraq
Soldiers’s Glowing Accounts of Success in Iraq Success Were Written by Commander
By Martha Raddatz
Oct. 13 — The letters appeared in roughly 12 newspapers across the country. From Massachusetts to California, and many places in between, family members and local newspapers received letters from soldiers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment detailing their successes in northern Iraq.
Each letter was signed by a different soldier, but the words were identical...
Amy Connell, of Sharon, Mass., knew as soon as she received the letter from her son Adam that he did not write it. "He's 20 years old and I don't think his language or his writing ability would have entailed that kind of description," she said.
She was right. Her son didn't write the letter. In an e-mail to ABCNEWS today, the commander of the battalion, Lt. Col. Dominic Caraccilo, said the "letter-writing initiative" was all his idea.
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 50%
November 06, 2003
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
November 05, 2003
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
Officers Say Bosnian Massacre Was Deliberate
By MARLISE SIMONS
La Liberation via NY Times
Sunday 12 October 2003
THE HAGUE, Oct. 8 -- Eight years after the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnians, doubts have lingered about the degree to which the killings were coldly planned, or were improvised in chaos.
Most of those killed were unarmed prisoners, boys and men, shot in groups, or sometimes one by one.
Among the executioners, only a few foot soldiers have talked about the events that turned Srebrenica -- its name means the "place of silver" -- into a symbol of a modern European nightmare. No architect of the crime has ever explained in public what was in the killers' minds, or what made them believe that the murderous frenzy was acceptable to their own society and to their leaders.
But now, two senior Bosnian Serb officers, both crucial figures involved in organizing the bloodshed at Srebrenica, have spoken out at the war crimes tribunal here, describing the countdown to the massacre and depicting a well-planned and deliberate killing operation. They say it was largely coordinated by the military security and intelligence branch of the Bosnian Serb Army and militarized police, forces that were on Serbia's payroll.
The two, an intelligence chief and a brigade commander, recently pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and have now given evidence against two fellow officers.
They provided so many names, firsthand accounts, documents and even a military log of the crucial days, that one court official blurted, "They've practically written the judgment."
Read It Rating: 9.7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -9
Learning Percentage: 77%
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
Iraq War Swells Al Qaeda's Ranks, Report Says
By Peter Graff
Reuters
Wednesday 15 October 2003
LONDON (Reuters) - War in Iraq has swollen the ranks of al Qaeda and galvanized the Islamic militant group's will, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said on Wednesday in its annual report.
The 2003-2004 edition of the British-based think-tank's annual bible for defense analysts, The Military Balance, said Washington's assertions after the Iraq conflict that it had turned the corner in the war on terror were "over-confident."
The report, widely considered an authoritative text on the military capabilities of states and militant groups worldwide, could prove fodder for critics of the U.S.-British invasion and of the reconstruction effort that has followed in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Bush’s New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
Jacob Hornberger's political commentaries are uniformly well-written and intelligent -- and this one is no exception. Included in it is a 7-point breakdown of "the big picture regarding the relationship between the U.S. government’s morally bankrupt foreign policy and terrorism against America". It's the standard stuff -- our support of various foul leaders in the Middle East (including Saddam Hussein), our stationing of troops in Islamic holy lands, etc. -- but it's nice to see it broken down so plainly, by someone with a lot of experience at being critical of U.S. foreign policy in a scholarly way.
He follows the breakdown of that 30-year history with this:
Ask yourself these important questions: Can you think of a more perfect prescription for terrorism against the United States than all that? How could anyone be surprised that the victims — or friends and relatives of the victims — would ultimately retaliate?
The answer to the questions are, I think: "No", and "willfull ignorance".
Bush's New Morally Bankrupt PR Campaign on Terrorism and Iraq
by Jacob Hornberger
Founder and President of the Future of Freedom Foundation
The Bush administration is at it once again — engaging in a new
public-relations campaign to scare the American people half to death with the possibility of terrorist attacks with weapons of mass destruction and to garner support for its invasion and continued occupation of Iraq, which has not only cost the lives of thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of Americans but which now has also become an economic black hole that threatens the economic security of our nation by sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the pockets of the American people.
Speaking in New Hampshire, President Bush declared, “I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein…. The danger hasn’t passed. The terrorists continue to plot and plan against our country and our people…. America must not forget the lessons of September 11.”
Addressing the conservative Heritage Foundation, Vice President Cheney declared that terrorists are “doing everything they can” to get weapons of mass destruction that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans “in a single day of horror…. Some claim that we should not have acted because the threat from Saddam Hussein was not imminent. Terrorist enemies of our country hope to strike us with the most lethal weapons known to man, and it would be reckless in the extreme to rule out action and save our worries until the day they strike.”
Speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice declared that Saddam could have produced weapons of mass destruction “to mount a future attack beyond the scale of 9/11 — and that terrible prospect could not be put aside.”
Never mind that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, and never mind that Bush has now publicly admitted that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks. There’s a much more fundamental problem that the American people ignore at their peril: It is the U.S. government's morally bankrupt foreign policy, including its unprovoked and illegal war of aggression against Iraq, that has produced (and continues to produce) the anger and hatred that motivates Arabs to commit terrorist acts against the United States.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 4
Learning Percentage: 10%
October 26, 2003
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
October 11, 2003
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel where Wolfowitz was staying
U.S. Soldier Killed in Attack on Baghdad Hotel
By REUTERS
BAGHDAD, Oct. 26 -- Guerrillas blasted rockets at Baghdad's most heavily fortified hotel where U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was staying on Sunday, killing an American soldier and wounding 15 people, U.S. officials said.
Wolfowitz, who escaped unhurt, vowed that the United States would not be cowed into abandoning Iraq.
But the bold attack on the hotel with the tightest security in Baghdad, if not the Middle East, undermined Washington's claim that it is steadily defeating the guerrillas who have killed 109 U.S. soldiers since President George W. Bush declared major combat in Iraq over on May 1.
Unrest in Shiite district over attacks
CNN.com - Unrest in Shiite district over attacks - Oct. 10, 2003
Crowd chants 'No, no America'
Friday, October 10, 2003 Posted: 3:56 PM EDT (1956 GMT)
BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Anti-U.S. feeling swirled among worshippers and demonstrators Friday in the sprawling Shiite slum where two U.S. soldiers were gunned down and eight Iraqi police officers were killed in a suicide attack a day earlier.
Such violence has so far been rare in the neighborhood, Sadr City, which was a base of anti-Saddam Hussein sentiment.
But the depressed district now may become a center of resistance to the U.S. occupation, and a powerful imam with a huge power base there, Muqtada al-Sadr, has taken an anti-American stand.
...
As many as 6,000 worshippers gathered in front of the Sadr City municipal offices near the ambush site for Friday prayers and a sermon was delivered by an al-Sadr aide, Sheikh Abdel-Hadi al-Daraji.
"America claims to be the founder of freedom and democracy. That is wrong. Instead, it is nothing but a terrorist organization that leads the world through its terrorism and its reckless arrogance," the cleric said.
"It is forbidden for the American forces to enter Sadr City, especially for the next few days because the sons of Sadr City reject their presence."
The crowds chanted "No, No America!" ...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 65%
October 09, 2003
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
October 04, 2003
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Bush aides admit Iraq missteps
Say estimates on oil revenue, damage off
By Wayne Washington, Globe Staff, 9/9/2003
WASHINGTON -- One day after President Bush gave the nation a cautious view of rebuilding efforts in Iraq, senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to the country's infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country.
Yesterday's sobering assessments came as members of Congress are contemplating Bush's request for $87 billion to stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan -- and call into question earlier pronouncements by administration officials about the size and cost of the job.
The disclosures, coming on the heels of Bush's prime-time address, mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 10%
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
A Wider War -- Unless The Democrats Speak Out
By Paul Craig Roberts
September 08, 2003
I blame the Democrats for the "war on terror." I know the neoconservatives planned the conquest of the Middle East long before the events of September 11 gave them an excuse. Internet pundits are familiar with the blueprint for American Empire put together by the neocon think tank, Project for the New American Century. Indeed, everyone in the world seems to know about it except the American public.
Still, the Democrats are to blame. It was the Democrats' war on Bush that created the "war on terror."
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: .1
Learning Percentage: 8%
Neophyte Gorge
This author is trying a bit too hard, with too much imagery and sarcasm. She did however provide a link to a page that tells you how to grow your own botulinim bacteria among the many embedded links in her column. So there's that.
by Karen Kwiatkowski
Read It Rating: 3
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .4
Learning Percentage: 25%
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
This is a very well-written article about life in the midst of a National Guard unit in Baghdad. It's quite long, with too much to effectively excerpt, but I definitely recommend taking the time to read it.
Stretched Thin, Lied to and Mistreated
On the ground with US troops in Iraq
by Christian Parenti
Published in the October 6, 2003 issue of The Nation (subscription requeired)
An M-16 rifle hangs by a cramped military cot. On the wall above is a message in thick black ink: "Ali Baba, you owe me a strawberry milk!"
It's a private joke but could just as easily summarize the worldview of American soldiers here in Baghdad, the fetid basement of Donald Rumsfeld's house of victory. Trapped in the polluted heat, poorly supplied and cut off from regular news, the GIs are fighting a guerrilla war that they neither wanted, expected nor trained for. On the urban battlefields of central Iraq, "shock and awe" and all the other "new way of war" buzzwords are drowned out by the din of diesel-powered generators, Islamic prayer calls and the occasional pop of small-arms fire.
Here, the high-tech weaponry that so emboldens Pentagon bureaucrats is largely useless, and the grinding work of counterinsurgency is done the old-fashioned way--by hand. Not surprisingly, most of the American GIs stuck with the job are weary, frustrated and ready to go home.
...
Full story at TruthOut, or at CommonDreams.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Chomsky: Reasons to fear U.S.
NOAM CHOMSKY
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Amid the aftershocks of recent suicide bombings in Baghdad and Najaf, and countless other horrors since Sept. 11, 2001, it is easy to understand why many believe that the world has entered a new and frightening "age of terror," the title of a recent collection of essays by Yale University scholars and others.
However, two years after 9/11, the United States has yet to confront the roots of terrorism, has waged more war than peace and has continually raised the stakes of international confrontation.
On 9/11, the world reacted with shock and horror, and sympathy for the victims. But it is important to bear in mind that for much of the world, there was a further reaction: "Welcome to the club."
For the first time in history, a Western power was subjected to an atrocity of the kind that is all too familiar elsewhere.
Any attempt to make sense of events since then will naturally begin with an investigation of American power — how it has reacted and what course it may take.
Within a month of 9/11, Afghanistan was under attack. ...
TruthOut permacopy (With title changed)
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
October 03, 2003
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
October 01, 2003
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
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Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
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"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
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Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
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In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
The Clark Critique
Exclusive: In an excerpt from his new book, the ex-general argues that Bush is leading us astray in the war on terror
By Gen. Wesley K. Clark
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 29 issue -- In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, many in the Bush administration seemed most focused on a prospective move against Iraq. This was the old idea of "state sponsorship" --even though there was no evidence of Iraqi sponsorship of 9/11 whatsoever--and the opportunity to "roll it all up." I could imagine the arguments. War to unseat Saddam Hussein promised concrete, visible action.
I WENT BACK through the Pentagon in November 2001, and one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. So, I thought, this is what they mean when they talk about "draining the swamp." It was evidence of the Cold War approach: Terrorism must have a “state sponsor,” and it would be much more effective to attack a state than to chase after individuals, nebulous organizations, and shadowy associations.
He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.
...
Al Jazeera also took excerpts from Gen. Clark's article, and a little more content, and weaved it into an article of their own. (TruthOut permacopy)
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
Rivers Pitt: Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
About President Bush's recent speech to the UN.
t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | Situation Excellent, I Am Attacking
Excerpt:
Never mind the rank absurdity of it all. There is an old story of a French officer who, when thrown into an impossible battle, sent a communiqué to his commanders: "Hard pressed on my right. My center is yielding. Impossible to maneuver. Situation excellent, I am attacking!" That sad chestnut was on display before the United Nations on Tuesday, with George W. Bush and the United States of America standing in for the officer. Bush was at the United Nations for one reason: He got his country into terrible trouble, in defiance of virtually the entire international community, and was forced to come begging for help. An ounce of contrition would have furthered the cause of actually helping to repair the devastation in Iraq. An ounce of contrition would have shown America to be the humble nation Bush promised us way back in 2000. An ounce of contrition would almost certainly have motivated the U.N. to leave aside wrangling, roll up its sleeves, and begin to repair the damage that has been done. That ounce was not offered, and the jut-jawed whipsaw President barefaced his way through what could have been the most hopeful moment the Iraqi people have seen in 100 years. Situation excellent, I am attacking.
Never mind the 26,000 liters of anthrax, the 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, the 500 tons of sarin and mustard gas and VX gas, the 30,000 munitions capable of deploying this red death, the mobile biological weapons labs, and the infamous 'yellow-cake' uranium from Niger, that has so fantastically failed to materialize. All of this is sitting on a White House web page called 'Disarm Saddam Hussein.' This was the argument, the reason for war. None of it exists in any coherent state. The administration's own hired-gun weapons inspector, Dr. David Kay, has been tearing through Iraq to find all of these horrors promised by Bush and the gang. His report, saying pointedly that the stuff isn't there, was ready to be released on September 15th, but was promptly buried by the administration.
Never mind all that. It comes down to this.
Over the last 227 years, the United States of America went from a brawling, rebellious infant to the greatest democracy in the universe. This nation spent oceans of blood, sweat and tears to earn the respect of the world. Too often, it abused that respect by abusing the world, but always managed to regain its standing within the global community by the sheer force of its goodness, its ideals, and its willingness to help other nations in need. When the attacks of September 11th came, that global community responded to our essential goodness by embracing us with a passionate ferocity that has no precedent in the annals of human history. That standing is dust now, ground under the heels of a pack of ideological extremists who would wrap the world in flames if it profited them a few more ducats. The world sees this, and has seen it for some time now. The United Nations was used on Tuesday as a prop for a failing President's Fox newsbite writ large. It is a shame and a scandal and a disaster beyond description that this great nation has fallen so very low.
...
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 5%
Raimondo: Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
Mr. Sharon, Tear Down That Wall!
That's what Bush should have said.
by Justin Raimondo
The "fence," as the Israelis and their amen corner in the U.S. call it, is actually a wall, about 25 feet high: higher than the Berlin Wall. Like every atrocity carried out by the Israeli government, it is being sold as a "defensive" measure, but is in reality an act of aggression, cutting off large swathes of Palestinian property from the main body of the Palestinian community and preemptively establishing a border on annexed land. As the Los Angeles Times reported:
"The red signs appeared one morning on the barbed wire. 'Mortal danger; military zone,' they read. 'Any person who passes or damages the fence endangers his life.'
"And just like that, Mohammed Habbas was forbidden to reach the acres of fields and olive groves that have been in the family for as long as anyone here can remember. The people of this tiny hillside village were left behind when Israeli military walls chopped away more than half of their property, snaking all the way to the edges of houses to swallow the land – but exclude the people."
Only a few days ago, meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Abu Mazen, the President declared the wall to be "a problem." But now that Sharon's in town, the problem – but not the Wall – seems to have gone away. ...
Full column
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating:
Freedom Rating: .12
Learning Percentage: 25%
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
White House Ambushed By Criticism From America's Military Community
By Andrew Gumbel
Independent UK
Saturday 20 September 2003
George Bush probably owes his presidency to the absentee military voters who nudged his tally in Florida decisively past Al Gore's. But now, with Iraq in chaos and the reasons for going to war there mired in controversy, an increasingly disgruntled military poses perhaps the gravest immediate threat to his political future, just one year before the presidential elections.
From Vietnam veterans to fresh young recruits, from seasoned officers to anxious mothers worried about their sons' safety on the streets of Baghdad and Fallujah, the military community is growing ever more vocal in its opposition to the White House.
"I once believed that I served for a cause: 'To uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States'. Now I no longer believe that," Tim Predmore, a member of the 101st Airborne Division serving near Mosul, wrote in a blistering opinion piece this week for his home newspaper, the Peoria Journal Star in Illinois. "I can no longer justify my service for what I believe to be half-truths and bold lies."
The dissenters - many of whom have risked deep disapproval from the military establishment to voice their opinions - have set up websites with names such as Bring Them Home Now. They have cried foul at administration plans to cut veterans' benefits and scale back combat pay for troops still in Iraq. They were furious at President Bush for reacting to military deaths in Iraq with the phrase "bring 'em on".
And they have given politically embarrassing prominence to such issues as the inefficiency of civilian contractors hired to provide shelter, water and food - many of them contributors to the Bush campaign coffers - and a mystery outbreak of respiratory illnesses that many soldiers, despite official denials, believe is related to the use of depleted uranium munitions.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
Byrd: Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
Marshall Plan to Bush Iraqi Plan: No Comparison
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd
Wednesday 24 September 2003
Opening remarks to the Senate Appropriations Committee considering Bush Administration request for 87B additional dollars in funding for the Iraqi occupation.
The American people want to know more about what the Administration has planned for Iraq, and it is the responsibility of Congress to help inform our public. But rather than explanations of the Administration's long-term plan for Iraq, we only hear comparisons to the Marshall Plan.
I can understand the Administration's desire to equate in the minds of the American public Saddam Hussein's Iraq to Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan. World War II invokes images of the "Greatest Generation" -- the entire country united to defeat the Axis powers, and then, after victory, stayed behind to rebuild the cities of their conquered foes.
But with World War II, Japan had attacked us. The Axis Powers had declared war on us. The U.S. occupation of Germany and Japan took place in the wake of a widely supported defensive war, under a commitment to internationalism and multilateralism.
We're seeing none of this in Iraq. For one, the war in Iraq was not defensive. It was a preemptive attack. Secondly, we have alienated most of the international community in fighting the war. Third, the Germans and Japanese did not resist the U.S. occupation through sabotage, assassinations, and guerilla warfare.
The Marshall Plan was not a huge bill presented to Congress for its rubber-stamp approval. It was a comprehensive strategy to provide $13.3 billion to 16 countries over four years to aid in reconstruction. In current dollars, the U.S. share would be about $88.2 billion spread over four years - very nearly the same amount that has been requested by the President for one country for a period of mere months.
...
The $87 billion package that the President is seeking has little in common with the Marshall Plan. We should not learn our history through sound bites. Congress has an obligation to understand what this $87 billion is supposed to do for Iraq, and whether those goals can ever be achieved.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L3.5
Freedom Rating: .14
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 21, 2003
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
September 17, 2003
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
Pride and Prejudices
How Americans have fooled themselves about the war in Iraq, and why they’ve had to
by Christopher Dickey
NEWSWEEK
Sept. 19 — A sturdy-looking American matron in the audience at the American University of Paris grew redder by the second. She was listening to a panel talking about the Iraq war and its effect on U.S.-French relations, and she kept nodding her head like a pump building emotional pressure.
Finally she exploded: "Surely these can't be the only reasons we invaded Iraq!" the woman thundered, half scolding, but also half pleading. "Surely not!"
...
As we went down the list, I could see the Nodding Woman’s problem was not that she didn’t believe us, it was that she did. She just desperately wanted other reasons, better reasons, some she could consider valid reasons for the price that Americans are paying in blood and treasure.
...
The problem is not really that the public was misinformed by the press before the war, or somehow denied the truth afterward. The problem is that Americans just can’t believe their eyes. They cannot fathom the combination of cynicism, naiveté, arrogance and ignorance that dragged us into this quagmire, and they’re in a deep state of denial about it.
...
Bush knows what a lot of his critics have forgotten: the Iraq war is not just about blood and treasure, or even about democracy or WMD or terror. It’s about American pride. And people—perfectly intelligent people—have always been willing to sacrifice sweet reason in order to save face, to protect pride. As George Orwell pointed out, they will refuse to see what’s right in front of their noses. He called this condition a kind of political schizophrenia, and society can live quite comfortably with it, he said, until “a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
Well, that’s what’s happening right now. It’s not only American money and lives that are being lost, it’s pride. But people in the United States will try to deny that for as long as they possibly can.
...
...the bitterest contradiction of all may be that this war was waged—first and foremost—to save face after the humiliation and suffering of September 11. It was meant to inspire awe in the Arab and Muslim world, as former CIA operative Marc Reuel Gerecht and others insisted it should be. And in that it truly has failed. Every day we look weaker. And the worst news of all it that it’s not because of what was done to us by our enemies but because of what we’ve done to ourselves.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
Wolfowitz Shifts Rationales on Iraq War
With Weapons Unfound, Talk of Threat Gives Way to Rhetoric on Hussein, Democracy
As the Bush administration's leading hawk on Iraq, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz has been a tireless proponent of the argument that Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction was a compelling enough reason for the United States to resort to war.
These days, his emphasis is different. In testimony to congressional committees and interviews with reporters, Wolfowitz prefers to stress the evil, dictatorial nature of former president Saddam Hussein's defunct government and the opportunity to turn Iraq into a beacon of hope for the rest of the Middle East. He depicts Iraq as the focus of a life-and-death struggle between the forces of democracy and the forces of intolerance.
...
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 20%
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Eight Civilians Killed in U.S. Strike on Taliban
Sat September 20, 2003
By Sayed Salahuddin
KABUL (Reuters) - At least eight Afghan nomads, including women and children, were killed in a U.S. air strike in Afghanistan that also killed two Taliban guerrillas, Afghan officials said on Saturday.
In a separate incident, Taliban guerrillas killed a district police chief in the southern province of Kandahar, underscoring a revival of violence recently in a country that has seen mostly strife for the past quarter-century.
The civilians died in their beds when a bomb landed on their tent in Naw Bahar district of the southern province of Zabul on Wednesday night, said deputy provincial governor Mohammad Omar.
A U.S. military spokesman said he could not immediately confirm the report.
Mohammad Gul Neyazi, a top commander of the Taliban, and another Taliban guerrilla were also killed during the attack in the remote district near the border with Pakistan, Omar said.
"The figure I have for the civilian death toll is at least eight," Omar told Reuters. "The Taliban commander and his friend were apparently using a satellite phone, the signal of which was detected by American aircraft which then carried out the attack."
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Raimondo: Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
Justin Raimondo: rants with links. This is another one.
Bush Speech: No U-Turn on the Road to Empire
by Justin Raimondo
The Sunday morning talk shows were teeming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss's evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here's Colin Powell on "Face the Nation":
"It's going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we'll get control of the security situation."
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he'd issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
"My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?"
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department's civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party's kitchen is a busy place: they're always cooking up something, and there's a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they're on the defensive, what with some prominent Democrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons' public humiliation. "Tonight," she predicts, "will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare."
...
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 25%
September 14, 2003
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
September 10, 2003
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
The wounded: America's hidden battlefield toll
The Observer | International | America's hidden battlefield toll
New figures reveal the true number of GIs wounded in Iraq
Jason Burke in London and Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 14, 2003
The true scale of American casualties in Iraq is revealed today by new figures obtained by The Observer, which show that more than 6,000 American servicemen have been evacuated for medical reasons since the beginning of the war, including more than 1,500 American soldiers who have been wounded, many seriously.
The figures will shock many Americans, who believe that casualties in the war in Iraq have been relatively light. Recent polls show that support for President George Bush and his administration's policy in Iraq has been slipping.
The number of casualties will also increase pressure on Bush to share the burden of occupying Iraq with more nations. Attempts to broker an international alliance to pour more men and money into Iraq foundered yesterday when Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, brusquely rejected a French proposal as 'totally unrealistic'.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust Cheney and Wolfowitz
Wisconsin congressman asks Bush to oust defense leaders
MADISON (AP) -- A congressman from Wisconsin has asked President Bush to call for the resignations of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, saying they have so mishandled the war in Iraq that they should quit.
"I recommend that you allow the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense to return to the private sector," wrote U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee.
The 18-term congressman said he thought long and hard before writing the letter, realizing that it's a serious matter to suggest to a president that a member of his Cabinet should leave.
But he said he concluded it was necessary, after talking with defense and diplomatic experts and people in his district.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "have made repeated and serious miscalculations, miscalculations that have been extremely costly to the American people in terms of lives lost, degradation of our military and intelligence capability to defend against terrorists in countries outside Iraq, isolation from our traditional allies and unexpected demands on our budget that are crowding our other priorities," Obey wrote.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 45%
September 09, 2003
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
September 08, 2003
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Buchanan: The imperial retreat begins
The imperial retreat begins
by Patrick J. Buchanan
We cannot do it by ourselves in Iraq. We need help.
That is the message sent in the clear to the Mideast and the world by our going back to the United Nations to ask for troops and aid in Iraq. Our enemies can read that message as well as our friends.
...
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 10%
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
Bush seeks an exit strategy as war threatens his career
The President will make a dramatic U-turn on Iraq in a TV broadcast tonight to try to salvage his hopes of re-election amid Americans' growing hostility to the casualties and chaos. Report by Paul Harris in New York, Jason Burke and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
George Bush will attempt tonight to convince the American people that he has a workable 'exit strategy' to free his forces from the rapidly souring conflict in Iraq, as Britain prepares to send in thousands more troops to reinforce the faltering coalition effort.
Frantic negotiations continued this weekend in New York to secure a United Nations resolution that would open the way for other countries to deploy peacekeeping troops to help after Bush - with one eye on next year's presidential election - signalled a change of heart on America's refusal to allow any but coalition forces into Iraq.
...
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 30%
September 06, 2003
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
September 04, 2003
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Former British MP sparks fury over claims on September 11 and Iraq war
Michael Meacher, who served as a minister for six years until three months ago, today goes further than any other mainstream British politician in blaming the Iraq war on a US desire for domination of the Gulf and the world.
Mr Meacher, a leftwinger who is close to the green lobby, also claims in an article in today's Guardian that the war on terrorism is a smokescreen and that the US knew in advance about the September 11 attack on New York but, for strategic reasons, chose not to act on the warnings.
He says the US goal is "world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies" and that this Pax Americana "provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis".
...
He says that the plans of the neo-conservatives in Washington for action against Afghanistan and Iraq were well in hand before September 11. He questions why the US failed to heed intelligence about al-Qaida operatives in the US and the apparent slow reaction of the US authorities on the day, as well as the subsequent inability to lay hands on Bin Laden.
He argues that the explanation makes sense when seen against the background of the neo-conservative plan.
"From this it seems that the so-called 'war on terrorism' is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 50%
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
Bring Our Troops Home and Send In the Neocons
by Ron Holland
Today is just another day and another major bombing against US and US-affiliated targets in Iraq. Our garrison troops continue under attack daily and the oil pipelines continue to explode and burn. Why the heck are we there and isn't it time to take the false neocon propaganda and the neocon advisors and put them where they have placed our American men and women in uniform?
...
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 1.1
Learning Percentage: 8%
August 31, 2003
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 30, 2003
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
CBS News | Poll: U.S. Losing Grip In Iraq
August 29, 2003
Americans express growing concern that things are not going well for the U.S. in Iraq. More now than at any time since the war ended think things are going badly for the U.S. there, and an increasing number see U.S. control of events there slipping away. Americans continue to support the United Nations having a lead role in Iraq.
...
Just 42% of Americans think the U.S. is in control of events in Iraq, while 47% think the U.S. is not in control there. That is a slightly more negative assessment of the situation than was seen earlier in August, when 45% thought the U.S. was in control in Iraq, and 43% thought it was not. It is a drastic change in public perceptions since the end of April, when the war was still underway.
...
Despite continuing casualties, Americans’ views about whether the war in Iraq was worthwhile have changed little in the past few months. Since July, the public has been divided as to whether the result of the war was worth the loss of American life and the other costs of attacking Iraq; 46% now think it was worth it, and 46% think it was not.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Analysis: Is 'Perfect Storm' Brewing for Bush?
Yahoo/Reuters
As the 2004 election nears, President Bush could face an international "perfect storm" -- more attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, an overextended deployment of U.S. troops eager to come home and blackening clouds over the Middle East, North Korea and Iran.
The confluence of world events will test Bush's foreign policy leadership even as he must concentrate on the U.S. economy and other domestic issues that could determine whether he wins a second term.
Although most Americans still have a favorable opinion of the president, his job performance rating has slipped to 52 percent positive and 48 percent negative in a recent poll of 1,011 likely U.S. voters by Zogby International. This compares with a post-Sept. 11, 2001, peak rating of 82 percent positive.
...
"A perfect storm (on security) is brewing for the rest of the year," said one military planner, referring to a catastrophic clash of three storms that menaced the U.S. Northeastern coast in 1991.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 10%
August 18, 2003
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 17, 2003
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
Porn, Drugs, Weapons Hit Baghdad Streets
By Andrew England
Associated Press
Sunday 17 August 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A Quranic verse plastered on a monument to freedom carries a simple message - God will send a plague on those who deal in drugs and spread corruption.
But the message is being widely ignored.
Across the busy highway from the monument, built in 1958 after the overthrow of the monarchy, traders have set up gambling tables and are openly selling pornography, fake ID cards and looted goods - including laboratory microscopes, industrial fuse boxes and pills stolen from psychiatric hospitals.
"Now we have freedom and democracy," said a 34-year-old trader selling pornographic DVDs with titles such as "The Dirty Family" and "The Young Wife," and photocopied postcards of couples in various sexual positions. "We could not sell them when Saddam was here."
This is Baghdad four months after U.S. troops took over the sprawling city of 5 million - jobless, insecure, and in many cases taking "freedom and democracy" as license to do pretty much what you want and get away with it.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .2
Learning Percentage: 55%
Democracy in Iraq might be impossible, US was told
Democracy might be impossible, US was told
By Bryan Bender, Globe Correspondent, 8/14/2003
WASHINGTON -- US intelligence officials cautioned the National Security Council before the Iraq war that the American plan to build democracy on the ashes of Saddam Hussein's regime -- as a model for the rest of the region -- was so audacious that, in the words of one CIA report in March, it could ultimately prove "impossible."
That assessment ran counter to what the Bush administration was saying at the time as it sought to build support for the war. President Bush said a democratic Iraq would lead to more liberalized, representative governments, where terrorists would find less popular support, and the Muslim world would be friendlier to the United States. "A new regime in Iraq would serve as an inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region," he said on Feb. 26.
The question of how quickly, and easily, the United States could establish democracy in Iraq was the key to a larger concern about how long US troops would be required to stay there, and how many would be needed to maintain security. The administration offered few assessments of its own but dismissed predictions by the army chief of staff of a lengthy occupation by hundreds of thousands of troops.
Now, frustration among Iraqis about a lack of stability and the slow pace of reconstruction -- and new evidence that Islamic militants are slipping into Iraq to take up arms against the Americans -- are leading the administration to lengthen its plans to keep troops in Iraq for up to four years. And the Pentagon is moving to lower expectations for a shift to democracy, suggesting that a liberal democracy is an ideal worth fighting for, but acknowledging the difficulty of creating one.
"The question isn't whether it is feasible, but is it worth a try," Lieutenant Colonel James Cassella, a Pentagon spokesman, said yesterday.
"Is it worth a try"? Wouldn't the question be "Is it worth killing thousands of innocent people and destabilizing the world for an effort to accomplish something that is likely impossible?"?
Is that "worth a try?"
Read It Rating: 8.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 15%
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Clerics Urge U.S. to Quit Iraq
Fri Aug 15,12:12 PM ET
By Nadim Ladki
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Clerics from across the Muslim sectarian divide blasted the U.S. occupation of Iraq in Friday prayers as guerrilla hit-and-run attacks in the center of the country inflicted more American casualties.
...
Chanting "Yes for Islam, No to America," more than 5,000 worshippers held prayers in open air at a street in northern Baghdad's Sadr City, where U.S. forces shot dead one Iraqi and wounded four during a protest earlier in the week.
"What happened (in Sadr City) clearly shows that America and international Zionism have declared war against Islam," Sheikh Abdul Hadi al-Daraji said.
...
In the Sunni town of Falluja, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi said U.S. troops faced more attacks if they remained in Iraq.
"The future will witness more killing and resistance operations against the United States in Iraq," he told hundreds of worshippers in a mosque in the town, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
August 16, 2003
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
August 15, 2003
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles
Sweet!
A Debate Over U.S. 'Empire' Builds in Unexpected Circles (washingtonpost.com)
(TruthOut permacopy)
By Dan Morgan
The Washington Post
Sunday 10 August 2003
At forums sponsored by policy think tanks, on radio talk shows and around Cleveland Park dinner tables, one topic has been hotter than the weather in Washington this summer: Has the United States become the very "empire" that the republic's founders heartily rejected?
Liberal scholars have been raising the question but, more strikingly, so have some Republicans with impeccable conservative credentials.
For example, C. Boyden Gray, former counsel to President George H.W. Bush, has joined a small group that is considering ways to "educate Americans about the dangers of empire and the need to return to our founding traditions and values," according to an early draft of a proposed mission statement.
"Rogue Nation," a new book by former Reagan administration official Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Washington-based Economic Strategy Institute, contains a chapter that dubs the United States "The Unacknowledged Empire." And at the Nixon Center in Washington, established in 1994 by former president Richard M. Nixon, President Dimitri K. Simes is preparing a magazine-length essay that will examine the "American imperial predicament."
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 3.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
This re-examination of border history came about upon hearing that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante is a member or supporter of an organization that seeks to have much of the formerly-Mexican land returned to Mexico. (Or so I've heard.)
The Border | 1848 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
Excerpt:
At the time of the treaty, approximately 80,000 Mexicans lived in the ceded territory, which comprised only about 4 percent of Mexico’s population. Only a few people chose to remain Mexican citizens compared to the many that became United States citizens. Most of the 80,000 residents continued to live in the Southwest, believing in the guarantee that their property and civil rights would be protected. Sadly, this would not always be the case. By the end of the 19th century, most Mexicans had lost their land, either through force or fraud.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 50%
The U.S. Mexican War
Part of PBS' "The Border" online feature, from the "border timeline":
The Border | 1846 The U.S. Mexican War
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 40%
Pipes the Propagandist
Pipes the Propagandist
Bush's nominee doesn't belong at the U.S. Institute for Peace
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, August 11, 2003, at 8:23 AM PT
When I read that Daniel Pipes had been nominated to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (a federally funded body whose members are proposed by the president and confirmed by the Senate), my first reaction was one of bafflement. Why did Pipes want the nomination? After all, USIP, a somewhat mild organization, is devoted to the peaceful resolution of conflict. For Pipes, this notion is a contradiction in terms.
I am not myself a pacifist, and I believe that Islamic nihilism has to be combated with every weapon, intellectual and moral as well as military, which we possess or can acquire. But that is a position shared by a very wide spectrum of people. Pipes, however, uses this consensus to take a position somewhat to the right of Ariel Sharon, concerning a matter (the Israel-Palestine dispute) that actually can be settled by negotiation. And he employs the fears and insecurities created by Islamic extremism to slander or misrepresent those who disagree with him.
This makes him a poor if not useless ally in the wider battle. Let me give two illustrations from personal experience....
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: R2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 55%
August 12, 2003
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
August 11, 2003
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Family shot dead by panicking US troops
Firing blindly during a power cut, soldiers kill a father and three children in their car
By Justin Huggler in Baghdad
10 August 2003
The abd al-Kerim family didn't have a chance. American soldiers opened fire on their car with no warning and at close quarters. They killed the father and three of the children, one of them only eight years old. Now only the mother, Anwar, and a 13-year-old daughter are alive to tell how the bullets tore through the windscreen and how they screamed for the Americans to stop.
"We never did anything to the Americans and they just killed us," the heavily pregnant Ms abd al-Kerim said. "We were calling out to them 'Stop, stop, we are a family', but they kept on shooting."
The story of how Adel abd al-Kerim and three of his children were killed emerged yesterday, exactly 100 days after President George Bush declared the war in Iraq was over. In Washington yesterday, Mr Bush declared in a radio address: "Life is returning to normal for the Iraqi people ... All Americans can be proud of what our military and provisional authorities have achieved in Iraq."
But in this city Iraqi civilians still die needlessly almost every day at the hands of nervous, trigger-happy American soldiers.
Read It Rating: 5.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 45%
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
I run a whole other site devoted to this topic, BTW: PNAC.info
Pentagon Office Home to Neo-Con Network
WASHINGTON, Aug 7 (IPS) - An ad hoc office under U.S. Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith appears to have acted as the key base for an informal network of mostly neo-conservative political appointees that circumvented normal inter-agency channels to lead the push for war against Iraq.
The Office of Special Plans (OSP), which worked alongside the Near East and South Asia (NESA) bureau in Feith's domain, was originally created by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz to review raw information collected by the official U.S. intelligence agencies for connections between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
Retired intelligence officials from the State Department, the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have long charged that the two offices exaggerated and manipulated intelligence about Iraq before passing it along to the White House.
But key personnel who worked in both NESA and OSP were part of a broader network of neo-conservative ideologues and activists who worked with other Bush political appointees scattered around the national-security bureaucracy to move the country to war, according to retired Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who was assigned to NESA from May 2002 through February 2003.
Read It Rating: 9.8
Left/Right Rating: L1.5
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 65%
July 29, 2003
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 28, 2003
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
CBS News | Wolfowitz: Iraq Intel Was 'Murky'
July 28, 2003 11:49:40
(CBS/AP) Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the war in Iraq, told interviewers Sunday that intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons and suspected links to terrorism was "murky."
...
"Is this a murky picture? Yes, it's murky. Information about terrorism is inevitably murky because terrorists hide, and because you get an awful lot of information that's simply not true," he said.
...
But Wolfowitz's description of the intelligence as "murky" differed sharply from the way the spy data was characterized before the war.
In his Feb. 5 presentation to the Security Council, Secretary of State Colin Powell told delegates, "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence."
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 30%
Blair defends case for Iraq war
From the photo caption for this story: A new poll shows 54 percent of those questioned would not trust Blair "further than I could throw him."
The number isn't actually that stunning, but it's pretty funny that a polling company included that phrasing in a question. It's a slightly different metric than the rest of the pack.
CNN.com - Blair defends case for Iraq war - Jul. 8, 2003
British support for war declining, poll shows
LONDON, England -- Prime Minister Tony Blair has staunchly defended his case for going to war with Iraq, rejecting claims that he misled Britain ahead of the conflict.
"I refute any suggestion we misled parliament or the country totally," Blair told a committee of senior members of parliament Tuesday.
"I think we did the right thing in relation to Iraq. I stand 100 percent by it and I think our intelligence services gave us the correct intelligence and information at the time.
"I am quite sure we did the right thing in removing Saddam Hussein because not merely was he a threat ... to the wider world but it was an appalling regime that the world is well rid of."
Fighting for his political reputation, Blair said he was confident that weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: .5
Learning Percentage: 55%
Post-War, The Tone Has Changed
I'm doing some catching up, so there might be some oldish articles (like this one) in the coming batch.
This one's a TruthOut translation of a Le Monde article. Here's the original.
Le Monde
Friday 11 July 2003
The tone has changed. It is no longer the triumphant and triumphalist tone of the Commander-in-Chief of the American armed forces strapped into an air force fighter pilot outfit, landing in a combat jet on the deck of an aircraft carrier of the Pacific Fleet to celebrate the end of combat in Iraq. Thursday July 10 President George W. Bush soberly acknowledged: "We have a security problem in Iraq, without any doubt." Since the end of the war three months ago not a day has gone by that American forces have not been the object of several daily attacks: more than 70 soldiers have been killed, thirty or so of them in ambushes. According to a CBS poll the same Thursday, less than half of Americans believe the situation in Iraq is under control...
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 20%
July 20, 2003
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
July 13, 2003
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
From heroes to targets
I also posted this article at PNAC.info, my site about the "Washington ideologues" mentioned below.
Salon.com News | From heroes to targets
The U.S. occupation of Iraq has turned into a daily debacle, say experts, because the Washington ideologues who planned the war were living in a fantasy.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
July 18, 2003 | The Pentagon hawks who planned for postwar Iraq assumed American troops would be welcomed with flowers and gratitude. They assumed Saddam's regime could be decapitated but the body of the state left intact, to be administered by American advisors and handpicked Iraqis. They assumed that other countries, despite their opposition to the war, would come around once they saw how right America was, and would assist in Iraq's reconstruction.
The war's architects placed such unyielding faith in their assumptions that when they all turned out to be wrong, there was no Plan B.
Now, demoralized American forces are being attacked more than a dozen times a day and nearly every day an American soldier is killed. Iraqis are terrorized by violent crime; they lack water, electricity and jobs. With gunfire echoing through the night and no fans to stir the desert heat, people can't sleep and nerves are brittle. The number of troops on the ground is proving inadequate to restore order, but reinforcements, much less replacements, aren't readily available, and foreign help is not forthcoming. Saddam Hussein, like Osama bin Laden, is still at large. The White House now says the occupation will cost nearly $4 billion a month. While American fortunes could always improve, on Wednesday, Gen. John P. Abizaid, the new commander in Iraq, said American troops are fighting a guerrilla war, contradicting the sanguine rhetoric coming from the administration.
America isn't losing the peace. The peace never began.
The current chaos in Iraq, many experts say, is the inevitable result of grandiose neoconservative ideology smacking into reality. The neocons underestimated the Iraqis' nationalism and their mistrust of America. They were so convinced that a bright new Middle Eastern future would inevitably spring from military victory that they failed to prepare for any other scenario. "Everything derives from a very defective understanding of what Iraq was like," says retired Col. Pat Lang, who served as the Pentagon's chief of Middle Eastern intelligence from 1985 until 1992 and who has closely followed the discussions over the Iraq war and its aftermath. "It was a massive illusion that the neocons had. It all flows from that."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: -4.5
Learning Percentage: 50%
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Pentagon may punish GIs who spoke out on TV
Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer Friday, July 18, 2003
Excerpts:
...Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks of the open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful complaints.
But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second Brigade, Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired their complaints.
The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that it was extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by September if the security situation allows. They've been away from home since September, and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been extended.
...
On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah, where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful. One soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in the face." Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.
The retaliation from Washington was swift.
CAREERS OVER FOR SOME
"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At least six of us here will lose our careers."
First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media "on the record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving the sort of chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.
...
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
Thought you couldn't get any more appalled at what's going on in Iraq? Think again.
It turns out Bush was telling the truth in his 2000 campaign, when he said he wasn't into nation building. (Just nation destroying.)
If I had a "Read It" rating higher than 10, I'd give it to this article.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
From Daniel McGrory in Baghdad
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door.
But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
...
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
...
Mr Akhjan, whose 58-year-old father was arrested three weeks ago for driving a truck with no doors or headlights, said: “People are so sickened by what is happening they talk of wanting Saddam to come back. How bad can the Americans be that in three months we want that monster back?”
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 12, 2003
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 11, 2003
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Say It: This Is a Quagmire
by Tom Hayden
Excerpt:
No one in the media, military or political establishment can use the "Q-word" apparently, for fear of dredging up the images of Vietnam that they have been trying to erase for the past generation.
Quagmire is not a metaphor for Vietnam, but has a specific meaning. It is a strategic defeat. The occupier can't declare victory and can't withdraw. It's too early to be certain, but quagmire is becoming an accurate description of the American crisis:
-The occupation forces are stretched thin, forced into non-military roles such as policing and infrastructure repair, which makes them vulnerable to small-scale ambushes. A single suicide bomber could wreak havoc;
-the occupation forces cannot withdraw, for that would mean humiliation and failure;
-nor can the occupation forces expand significantly, not only for political reasons, but because they are bogged down in Afghanistan, Bosnia and many smaller destination spots in the U.S. Empire;
-the original plan for installing a new regime has stalled for reasons never adequately explained. Gen. Garner was forced out, and the Pentagon's favorite government-in-exile led by Ahmed Chalabi is marginalized and quarreling;
-Like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, the imperial mindset is dangerously incapable of understanding its opposition. The Iraqis must be fighting not because they oppose the occupation but because Saddam Hussein is secretly manipulating them from hiding.
-the most dangerous characteristic of quagmires is that there is no way out for the occupiers except through acknowledging the mistake. The longer the denial, the worse the quagmire.
-Opposition parties like the Democrats become sunk in quagmire as well. Some of them can declare "I told you so," but they fear the consequences of an American military withdrawal.
-Often, it takes the military, starting with the soldiers on the ground, to bring the nature of the quagmire to public attention. That may be beginning to happen. Last week, military officials needed military escorts to escape "seething spouses" at a military base in Georgia. (NYT, July 4)
Ending a quagmire eventually requires a strong peace movement and public frustration. ...
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L4
Freedom Rating: 3
Learning Percentage: 40%
Le Figaro interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
"One Must Follow One's Principles to the End"
Pierre Rousselin interviews French Foreign Affairs Minister Dominique de Villepin
Le Figaro
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 40%
Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
Another disturbingly revealing look at the fractured mess in Iraq.
Much of the article is fit for excerpting, but I'll just choose the one that was most striking, in the grand scheme of things. Dari and Ingram (mentioned in the excerpt) are respectively the Iraqi and U.S. leaders in the region featured in the story.
As of last week, neither Dari nor Ingram had ever had any contact with the U.S.-led civilian administration ostensibly governing Iraq, although Dari oversees an area that is home to 900,000 people.
t r u t h o u t - Local Elite In Iraq Losing Faith In U.S.
There appears to be a break in the text toward the end of the article, both on TruthOut and in the International Herald Tribune original
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -?
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 09, 2003
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
July 08, 2003
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
Liberia's Taylor not ready to leave
President says he's waiting on peacekeeping force
Tuesday, July 8, 2003
MONROVIA, Liberia (CNN) -- Liberian President Charles Taylor said in an interview Monday that he would honor his pledge to accept asylum in Nigeria only when conditions were right.
"My leaving office is dependent on two factors: one, my willingness to do so, and secondly, the presence of an international force that will stabilize the situation in the country as I depart," Taylor said.
Taylor said he would leave soon after such a force is in place. "I will then proceed to exercise the invitation granted to me by the president of Nigeria."
Into Africa -- How Iraq Begat Liberia
This article has a lot of in-context lnks to other articles about the issues it discusses.
Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia
July 7, 2003
Jesse Walker
Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.
So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it.
...
...it's hard to imagine anyone who doesn't want the American occupation of Iraq to end as soon as possible; the argument, for most of us, is over just how soon that is. It's hard to believe someone would want to add yet another occupation to our overburdened military's dance sheet.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 5
Learning Percentage: 60%
Guerilla Pox from Reason Express
This is one of the items in this week's Reason Express e-mail newsletter. It's a consistently excellent newsletter, which includes a few entries in this format, and then a couple sections of just story titles and links, and some quotes of the week. You can subscribe here. The full version of this week's newsletter is here.
1. Guerilla Pox
Don Rumsfeld can browbeat the Pentagon press pool all he wants. It will not change the fact that U.S. troops are now engaged in a low-level guerilla conflict with Iraqi irregular forces that have demonstrated some ability to plan and coordinate their attacks.
These forces appear to have three major targets. First, Iraqi infrastructure, which if kept dysfunctional saps the United States of both popular goodwill and resources. Second, U.S. military personnel, in small enough numbers to inflict casualties without sustaining any. Such assassinations hurt morale and are also intended to help turn American public opinion against the occupation. Third, the Iraqis who work with U.S. or coalition forces.
With this insurgent threat, there is little doubt that the U.S. faces serious obstacles to achieving a democratized and peaceful Iraq. The goal is not impossible, but it is surely not the euphoric cakewalk envisioned as Iraqi forces appeared to melt away while American columns approached. For it now seems certain that some of those forces never stopped fighting -- they merely shifted from a conventional to an unconventional stance.
The key, of course, is how many bad actors there are in the field. A few dozen die-hard Ba'athists loosely commanding a few hundred fighters and ad hoc jihads from neighboring countries could be enough to cause the kind of trouble Iraq now sees. Sooner or later such a force would spend itself, provided it does not receive new recruits.
But the U.S. does not have much time to work with. Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, is on record as saying he expects most of his troops to be home by September. In the best case scenario, where the U.S. finds a different unit to take the 3rd's place, those troops will need some weeks on the ground before they become effective in a role so hazardous and so impossible to prepare for.
Adding to the complications of operating in Iraq is a supposed ally that does not exactly see things the way America does. The detention of 11 Turkish soldiers by U.S. forces in Northern Iraq does not bode well for U.S. troops being able to leave the region anytime soon.
This little episode also demonstrates that the U.S. and Turkey do not even remotely share the same goals for Iraq. A stable and prosperous Iraq absolutely requires some sort of Kurdish autonomy, something that Turkey cannot abide.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/07/07/MN254188.DTL
http://printerfriendly.abcnews.com/printerfriendly/Print?fetchFromGLUE=true&GLUEService=ABCNewsCom
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10569-2003Jul4?language=printer
Full Reason Express rating-
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 6
Learning Percentage: 75%
TruthOut double-story: Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'; Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Two good stories about the current mood, attitudes, and situations of soldiers in Iraq.
Excerpts:
Some frustrated troops stationed in Iraq are writing letters to representatives in Congress to request their units be repatriated. "Most soldiers would empty their bank accounts just for a plane ticket home," said one recent Congressional letter written by an Army soldier now based in Iraq. The soldier requested anonymity.
...
The rethink about troop levels comes as senior military leaders voice concern that multiple deployments around the world are already taxing the endurance of US forces, the Army in particular. Some 370,000 soldiers are now deployed overseas from an Army active-duty, guard, and reserve force of just over 1 million people, according to Army figures.
...
The open-ended deployments in Iraq are lowering morale among some ground troops, who say constantly shifting time tables are reducing confidence in their leadership. "The way we have been treated and the continuous lies told to our families back home has devastated us all," a soldier in Iraq wrote in a letter to Congress.
...
"A lot of guys, because the dates have been tossed around, have lost hope," says Capt. John Jensen, an engineering battalion chaplain. "Nobody's been able to answer that question: when?"
...
The trauma of this conflict is varied: Soldiers say they have seen remarkable scenes of killing and carnage; others speak of fears they face daily, doing urban patrols against an unseen, ghostlike enemy. Others have been away from home too long, with the absence and new dangers fraying their families' patience.
One result is that the US Army is planning a screening process and two-week "decompression" session for soldiers going home, to look for danger signs, reacclimatize them to civilian life, and advise them on getting to know loved ones again.
The military community was shocked by the murder last summer of four wives in six weeks at Ft. Bragg, GA, after Special Forces returned home from Afghanistan.
...
Soldiers say they are also concerned about their reception and worry that the negative press about the US inability to stamp out resistance, heavy-handed behavior, and mismanaging the occupation will take some of the shine off their swift assault on Baghdad.
"We are not seeing people exhausted, but people with discipline problems - another sign of combat stress," says Colonel Knapp. "If they had gone home sooner, they would go home to a parade, put on their ribbons, and felt much better about themselves."
Originals at CSMonitor.com:
Troop Morale In Iraq Hits 'Rock Bottom'
Fatigued, US Troops Yearn For Home
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 06, 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
July 05, 2003
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
READY TO EXPLODE
Jul 3 2003
HOPE FOR FUTURE FADES IN IRAQ
From Tom Newton Dunn In Basra
FORMER Iraqi soldier Najab fingered his pistol and glared at two British soldiers trying to calm an angry crowd protesting at crippling shortages.
Speaking outside one of Saddam Hussein's old palaces just 50 yards from the British HQ in Basra, he said: "Our patience has run out. We've no money to feed ourselves, we haven't been paid for six months and we're fed up with broken promises.
"We've told the British today that if we're not paid by Friday, we'll arm ourselves with guns again and start killing every foreigner we see in Iraq."
This is Basra three months after British tanks rolled in to a rapturous welcome. Instead of jubilation there is frustration. In the broiling summer heat this is a city waiting to explode.
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -7.5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Wives Clamour for US Troops Return
Julian Borger reports from Hinesville in Georgia, where life is centred on the US Third Division
The Guardian
Excerpt:
One wife expressed anxiety about President George Bush's "bring them on" invitation to Iraqi guerrillas this week, but she stressed that she did not want her name mentioned.
"I support George Bush one hundred per cent," she said, almost with her next breath.
The ingrained patriotism of towns like Hinesville is not shaken easily. But Hinesville also feels the pain of a war that is refusing to end as neatly as was advertised.
"For the most part, it's immune," said Mr Donahue at the Coastal Courier.
"But," he added, "the longer the troops are over there, then the less immune it gets."
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
t r u t h o u t - Anger Rises for Families of US Troops in Iraq
By Jeffrey Gettleman
The New York Times
Excerpt:
"I want my husband home," Ms. Leija, a mother of three children, said. "I am so on edge. When they first left, I thought yeah, this will be bad, but war is what they trained for. But they are not fighting a war. They are not doing what they trained for. They have become police in a place they're not welcome."
Military families, so often the ones to put a cheery face on war, are growing vocal. ...
Frustrations became so bad recently at Fort Stewart, Ga., that a colonel, meeting with 800 seething spouses, most of them wives, had to be escorted from the session.
"They were crying, cussing, yelling and screaming for their men to come back," said Lucia Braxton, director of community services at Fort Stewart.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 04, 2003
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
July 03, 2003
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Wolfowitz granted authority over miltary tribunals
:-(
CNN.com - Defense deputy gets authority for military tribunals
From Barbara Starr
CNN Washington Bureau
Tuesday, June 24, 2003 Posted: 2:01 PM EDT (1801 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has delegated his role as "appointing authority" for military commissions to his deputy, according to Pentagon officials.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed a delegation last weekend putting Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in authority over the tribunals that will try al Qaeda and Taliban suspects, the officials said.
Under an order that President Bush issued in November 2001, military tribunals can be used to try non-citizens accused of terrorist acts. Individuals brought before the tribunals would have no right to a jury trial, no right to confront their accusers and no right to judicial review of trial procedures or sentences, which could include death.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: R8
Freedom Rating: -8.5
Learning Percentage: 70%
Flirting with Fascism
June 30, 2003 issue
Copyright © 2003 The American Conservative
Neocon theorist Michael Ledeen draws more from Italian fascism than from the American Right.
By John Laughland
On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon movement were also initially Trotskyites, like James Burnham and Max Kampelman—the latter a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler, a status that Evron Kirkpatrick, husband of Jeane, used his influence to obtain for him. But there is at least one neoconservative commentator whose personal political odyssey began with a fascination not with Trotskyism, but instead with another famous political movement that grew up in the early decades of the 20th century: fascism. I refer to Michael Ledeen, leading neocon theoretician, expert on Machiavelli, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute, regular columnist for National Review—and the principal cheerleader today for an extension of the war on terror to include regime change in Iran.
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: R4
Freedom Rating: 2
Learning Percentage: 90%
Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
The biggest thing to be learned from this story is how much detailed thought goes into the official statements of governments in regard to war. It's fair to assume that the same amount of detailed examination goes on here in the U.S.
The statements made by the Bush Administration were quite direct in their claims, not hedging them, as you can see the British took care to do.
IOL : Blair's spin-doctor admits 'editing' report
Read It Rating: 6
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -1
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
This is a series of short stories and snippets of reaction to Bush's belligerent comment of a couple days ago. Also included is a copy of a letter from Senator Frank Lautenberg to Donald Rumsfeld about his concerns over developments in Iraq.
t r u t h o u t - Bush Taking Heat for 'Bring Them On' Remark
Read It Rating: 4.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: 0
Learning Percentage: 40%
Bush: "Bring Them on"
Two different versions of the same AP story.
Yahoo! News - Bush Says Troops Aren't About to Withdraw
Excerpts:
"There are some who feel like that the conditions are such that they can attack us there. My answer is bring them on," Bush said. "We've got the force necessary to deal with the security situation."
...
...Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., called the president's language "irresponsible and inciteful."
"I am shaking my head in disbelief," Lautenberg said. "When I served in the Army in Europe during World War II, I never heard any military commander -- let alone the commander in chief -- invite enemies to attack U.S. troops."
Rep. Dick Gephardt, D-Mo., said, "I have a message for the president: enough of the phony, macho rhetoric."
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 55%
July 02, 2003
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
July 01, 2003
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Arianna: ... And Human Rights For All?
Arianna is awesome. We don't always see eye-to-eye, but she writes a great column -- lots of them. This is one.
With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt.
But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia?
His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth."
I don't support a doctrine of having the U.S. be the world's savior military force, but the bigger point in Arianna's article is right on target. Almost 4 million people have died in the Congo since 1998. If the U.S. is using liberation as a viable motive for going to war, cleaning up the Congo would be a no-brainer. And as Arianna says, maybe paying a visit during a tour of Africa. I guess Bush doesn't want to look hypocrisy so directly in the face.
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: L2
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 85%
'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
This is another double-story at TruthOut. Too depressing to try commenting on, really.
t r u t h o u t - 'Massive' Role in Iraq for US, More Troops Requested
Read It Rating: 9
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -10
Learning Percentage: 80%
'BAGHDAD BOB' GETS ARRESTED
I didn't know he was dubbed Baghdad Bob -- but I don't think I hang with the same crowd as the guy who wrote this article.
By NILES LATHEM
New York Post Online Edition
June 25, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - Saddam Hussein's top wartime propagandist - dubbed "Baghdad Bob" for his outlandish, lie-filled news briefings - was captured at a Baghdad roadblock, a London newspaper reported today.
Word of the capture came as six British troops were killed yesterday, in southern Iraq, the deadliest day for coalition forces since Saddam's fall.
Read It Rating: 3.5
Left/Right Rating: ?
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 40%
Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
This is one of the uglier of the recent Mess in Mesopotamia stories I've read, in terms of portending a grim future.
The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Iraqi attacks could signal wide revolt
By The Associated Press and Los Angeles Times
VICTOR CAIVANO / AP
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops in Iraq are getting ambushed everywhere and every day — while guarding gas stations, investigating car thefts or on their way to make phone calls home.
Each new attack is raising questions about whether the violence is a last gasp from Saddam Hussein loyalists or signs of a spreading revolt. The Pentagon is puzzling over how many resisters there are, how well they are organized and how they can be stopped.
Private risk analysts are warning of an even chance of Iraq descending into open revolt.
And although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 75%
Support for Iraq war slips 30% since May
Lots of interesting results in this article, if you care about polls.
CNN.com - Poll: Support for Iraq war slipping - Jul. 1, 2003
Only 56 percent of Americans view the current fighting as going well in Iraq, according to a new CNN/USA Today Gallup poll. That is much lower than the 70 percent in late May and the 86 percent in early May who thought the fighting was going well.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: 1
Learning Percentage: 75%
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
Occupation Forces Halting Elections Throughout Iraq
By William Booth and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post
Saturday 28 June 2003
SAMARRA, Iraq -- U.S. military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.
The decision to deny Iraqis a direct role in selecting municipal governments is creating anger and resentment among aspiring leaders and ordinary citizens, who say the U.S.-led occupation forces are not making good on their promise to bring greater freedom and democracy to a country dominated for three decades by Saddam Hussein.
The go-slow approach to representative government in at least a dozen provincial cities is especially frustrating to younger, middle-class professionals who say they want to help their communities emerge from postwar chaos and to let, as one put it, "Iraqis make decisions for Iraq."
"They give us a general," said Bahith Sattar, a biology teacher and tribal leader in Samarra who was a candidate for mayor until that election was canceled last week. "What does that tell you, eh? First of all, an Iraqi general? They lost the last three wars! They're not even good generals. And they know nothing about running a city."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 85%
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence
By James Risen and Douglas Jehl
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 June 2003
A top State Department expert on chemical and biological weapons told Congressional committees in closed-door hearings last week that he had been pressed to tailor his analysis on Iraq and other matters to conform with the Bush administration's views, several Congressional officials said today.
The officials described what they said was a dramatic moment at a House Intelligence Committee hearing last week when the weapons expert came forward to tell Congress he had felt such pressure.
By speaking out, they said, the senior intelligence expert, identified by several officials as Christian Westermann, became the first member of the intelligence community on active service to make this sort of admission to members of Congress.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -3
Learning Percentage: 50%
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
U.S. Finds Iraq War Far From Finished
By Alissa J. Rubin
Times Staff Writer
June 29, 2003
Guerrilla-style attacks are growing. A military official vows to stay the course in quelling resistance and rebuilding the nation.
BAGHDAD -- Facing a marked increase in the frequency and brazenness of attacks on U.S.-led forces in Iraq in the last two weeks, military officials are for the first time speaking more openly about the potential for a long-term fight to quell the resistance to the American presence.
Although the term is rarely used at the Pentagon, from every description by military officials, what U.S. troops face on the ground in Iraq has all the markings of a guerrilla war — albeit one in which there are multiple opposition groups rather than a single movement.
The rising opposition could further hamper the civilian reconstruction and delay the military's exit from the country, according to military experts.
...
None of the attacks are thought to be organized on a national or even a regional basis, but they don't need to be to achieve their goal of undermining the American-led coalition's effort to stabilize and rebuild the country.
"This is the danger of being an occupation force — you breed resentment the longer you stay," said the Cato Institute's Pena. "What we're seeing is just the tip of the iceberg."
"The natural tendency is to stay to fix the problem because after all we're Americans, we stay and fix the problems, but the reality is to accept that there are some things even superpowers can't do."
Read It Rating: 10
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 29, 2003
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
June 27, 2003
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
Experts Question Depth of Iraq Victory
Experts Question Depth of Victory
By Thomas E. Ricks
The Washington Post
Friday 27 June 2003
Attacks Indicate Baath Party Is Not Cowed
The wave of more sophisticated attacks on U.S. troops and civilian occupation forces in Iraq is raising new worries among military experts that the 21-day war that ended in April was an incomplete victory that defeated Saddam Hussein's military but not his Baath political party.
Neutralizing Baathist resistance is proving to be a more difficult job than the Pentagon calculated, and the continuing violence is becoming an embarrassment, one U.S. official in Baghdad said.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -6
Learning Percentage: 75%
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
U.S. pullback in S. Korea also alarming to N. Korea
James Brooke, New York Times
Published June 22, 2003
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA -- When the United States announced plans to pull its troops away from the border with North Korea, attention focused mostly on South Korea and its objections to losing the protection of the so-called tripwire. What was largely overlooked were the protests from the party that felt most threatened by the change: North Korea.
The tripwire, it seems, works both ways.
Read It Rating: 7
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 50%
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
Long and good.
The New Republic Online: The First Casualty (1 of 3)
THE SELLING OF THE IRAQ WAR.
The First Casualty
by John B. Judis & Spencer Ackerman
1 | 2 | 3
Post date 06.19.03 | Issue date 06.30.03
Foreign policy is always difficult in a democracy. Democracy requires openness. Yet foreign policy requires a level of secrecy that frees it from oversight and exposes it to abuse. As a result, Republicans and Democrats have long held that the intelligence agencies--the most clandestine of foreign policy institutions--should be insulated from political interference in much the same way as the higher reaches of the judiciary. As the Tower Commission, established to investigate the Iran-Contra scandal, warned in November 1987, "The democratic processes ... are subverted when intelligence is manipulated to affect decisions by elected officials and the public."
If anything, this principle has grown even more important since September 11, 2001. The Iraq war presented the United States with a new defense paradigm: preemptive war, waged in response to a prediction of a forthcoming attack against the United States or its allies. This kind of security policy requires the public to base its support or opposition on expert intelligence to which it has no direct access. It is up to the president and his administration--with a deep interest in a given policy outcome--nonetheless to portray the intelligence community's findings honestly. If an administration represents the intelligence unfairly, it effectively forecloses an informed choice about the most important question a nation faces: whether or not to go to war. That is exactly what the Bush administration did when it sought to convince the public and Congress that the United States should go to war with Iraq.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: L1
Freedom Rating: -7
Learning Percentage: 50%
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
More on the battle between U.S. intelligence and weapons experts and the White House over evidence of WMD in Iraq.
Cheney And The CIA: Not Business As Usual
CTNow.com
(produced by the Hartford Courant)
June 27, 2003
Ray McGovern
As though this were normal! I mean the repeated visits Vice President Dick Cheney made to the CIA before the war in Iraq. The visits were, in fact, unprecedented. During my 27-year career at the Central Intelligence Agency, no vice president ever came to us for a working visit.
During the '80s, it was my privilege to brief Vice President George H.W. Bush and other very senior policy-makers every other morning. I went either to the vice president's office or (on weekends) to his home. I am sure it never occurred to him to come to CIA headquarters.
The morning briefings gave us an excellent window on what was uppermost in the minds of those senior officials and helped us refine our tasks of collection and analysis. Thus, there was never any need for policy-makers to visit us. And the very thought of a vice president dropping by to help us with our analysis is extraordinary. We preferred to do that work without the pressure that inevitably comes from policy-makers at the table.
Ray McGovern, a CIA analyst from 1964 to 1990, regularly reported to the vice president and senior policy-makers on the President's Daily Brief from 1981 to 1985. He now is co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington.
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ?
Learning Percentage: 55%
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
AlterNet: 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq
By Christopher Scheer, AlterNet
June 27, 2003
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L5
Freedom Rating: -8
Learning Percentage: 25%
CNN's self-censorship
This is an interesting little blog post showing how CNN doctored an interview with Donald Rumsfeld, deleting a short interchange where the reporter talks to him about a video they have of his 1983 meeting with Saddam Hussein.
MyDD: Photo of Rumsfeld with Hussein
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 70%
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium
Long, informative, disturbing.
In These Times | Weapon of Mass Deception
Weapon of Mass Deception
What the Pentagon doesn't want us to know about depleted uranium.
By Frida Berrigan | 6.20.03
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: L3
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 68%
British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian
t r u t h o u t - 'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
'British Soldier Filmed Punching Iraqi Civilian'
Ananova
The Guardian
Friday 27 June 2003
The BBC claims it has footage of a British soldier punching an Iraqi civilian while handing out water.
The soldier is shown punching a man in the stomach in an apparently unprovoked attack, says a spokesman for the corporation.
It will be shown during the Fighting the War series on Sunday, and comes amid claims heavy-handed weapons searches in Al Majar al-Kabir could have contributed to the riot which left six Royal Military Police officers dead on Tuesday.
The film shows soldiers from the Black Watch handing out water in Az Zubayr in March, before the fall of Basra.
Townspeople had been without fresh water for six days and broke free from a queue when they saw water being handed out from the back of a truck.
Soldiers moved to stop them stampeding the truck, and one of the soldiers allegedly punched an Iraqi in the ribs, leaving him doubled up in pain.
Read It Rating: 5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 80%
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
A very revealing article.
t r u t h o u t - Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country
By Alissa J. Rubin
The Los Angeles Times
Friday 20 June 2003
An excerpt:
It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.
Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit's main street, tell the story. "Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation," reads one sign. Another reads, "Saddam still exists, you dog Bush." And one: "Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed."
Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud's capture, the Americans' questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.
"They are asking silly things. 'Have you seen Saddam Hussein?' 'Where did you see him?' And the answer they get is, 'No, I haven't seen him.' And that is reality," said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.
"If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you," he said with a pleasant smile, "because you are an American."
Nasiri's view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the "the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity."
Read It Rating: 9.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: ??
Learning Percentage: 85%
t r u t h o u t - A Bloody, Deadly Day for US Troops
A recounting of most of the major incidents of violence in Iraq in the past week.
4 Dead, 2 Abducted in Iraq Ambushes
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
The Associated Press
Read It Rating: 7.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 75%
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of Iraq's Cake
Thousands of Sub-contractors Fight Over a Share of the Cake
Excerpt:
Halliburton and Bechtel are assailed with requests. Bechtel has been contacted by 87,000 companies! The premier American engineering and construction group carried off a $680 million dollar contract April 17.
Its job will be to coordinate the overhauling of essential infrastructure: electric power stations and the electric network, sewage systems and water transport, airports. “Everything linked to major infrastructure passes through Bechtel today”, confirms Luke Zahner, spokesperson for USAID, the United States Agency for International Development.
Read It Rating: 8
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -5
Learning Percentage: 70%
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
Big surprise here.
t r u t h o u t - Halliburton is Principal Beneficiary of Iraq Reconstruction
The article is only semi-competently translated from a French publication.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: -2
Learning Percentage: 50%
F.A.I.R. - Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
From Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, via TruthOut.
June 20, 2003
Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11.
Read It Rating: 8.5
Left/Right Rating: 3L
Freedom Rating: -4
Learning Percentage: 60%
Searching for Saddam
A disjointed but informative article about the efforts to find Saddam Hussein.
t r u t h o u t - 'Saddam' Strike Shows US Desperation
Read It Rating: 6.5
Left/Right Rating: 0
Freedom Rating: N/A
Learning Percentage: 50%
