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International Human Rights Lawyer Points Out Absurdities in Hussein’s Legal Defense
Greg Szymanski
… “The court set up in Baghdad is not only biased, but it is incompetent and totally lacking any type of legal credibility normally associated with international cases,” said Dr. Doebbler. “As lawyers we hope the rule of law will be respected and thus far this is not the case. It is my belief that the tribunal is illegal in the first place. There is an overwhelming number of jurists and statesmen around the world, bound by international law, who openly recognize the invasion of Iraq as a preemptive strike and in violation of all sound principles of international law. And, it’s important to note, that one cannot create legal rights out of an illegal act, meaning what’s going in the Hussein trial has no legal merit to being with”…
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The End
Tom Mysiewicz, MMN
What has been the end of the Neocon’s Iraq strategy from the start? It’s fairly obvious now that it wasn’t WMDs or even oil. It’s clear to me that it was done for the benefit of Israel. But now that the Palestinians have been boxed in and any conceivable Israeli security objectives have been met, it’s obvious that Iraq is part of a more sinister endgame. For some two years prior to the Iraq war, in Council of Foreign Relations and other elite circles, stories were circulated about the benefits of partitioning Iraq into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish regions for the benefit of the “Greater Mid East” (read instead: “Eretz Israel”)…
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Oh Baghdad, my sweet …
Faiza Jarrar
…I have a great hope that the occupation will be defeated…And all who collaborated with him shall fall… History shall write again…that Baghdad fell, and rose again…as she has fallen before by the hands of the Moguls, then the Ottomans, then the British…then rose, and we saw her beautiful, golden days, before sinful fingers tampered with her again, from inside the country, and outside…They say that when the Khalif Abu Ja’afer Al-Mansoor intended to build Baghdad, and to make her the capital of the Abbasid state, he called upon scientists and astrologists, and asked them to look upon the fate of this city for him… They told him she will witness some grave days, and some beautiful, glorious days, and every time she might fall and crash, she will rise up all over again… Oh Baghdad, my sweet … You shall rise again…and brush off the dust of the occupiers, the invaders, and their monkeys some day…
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Thousands of civilians flee military offensive near Syrian border
IRIN
Thousands of civilians have fled the Iraqi town of al-Qaim near the Syrian border following the start of a fresh US military offensive against insurgents in nearby villages, local government officials said on Sunday. They told IRIN that about 600 families had abandoned al-Qaim, a small town in the Euphrates river valley, since the offensive began on Saturday. The number of people displaced by the fighting was expected to increase rapidly, they added. Many of those fleeing by car and on foot from al-Qaim, 12 km from the Syrian border, said they were taken by surprise by the latest US-led offensive…
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How Big is the Insurgency in Iraq?
John Robb
Can the US win in Iraq? One of the most important factors is the size of the Iraqi insurgency. However, the numbers presented by the US military on its size are less than compelling. They have ranged from 12,000 to 20,000. These numbers do not mesh with the reality of the situation:
The frequency, dispersion, and depth of attacks indicates a large force.
The resiliency of the insurgency despite substantial casualties and arrests (estimated at 1-2,000 a month) suggests a larger force.
The number of men who have become effectively “stateless” and “jobless” is very large…
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GI Special 3C70: “Significant Risks And Little Return” – September 2, 2005
www.militaryproject.org
“I think the most frustrating thing is there’s no sense of accomplishment,” Williams said. “You’re biding your time and waiting. But then you lose your friends, and it’s not even for their own country’s freedom.” “We’ve been here almost seven months and we don’t control” the cities, said Gunnery Sgt. Ralph Perrine, an operations chief in the battalion from Brunswick, Ohio. “It’s no secret.” “Their intelligence is better than ours,” Owens said. “I had concerns that the operation was hastily planned and executed, with significant risks and little return,” Toland said…
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Torture of Iraqis was for ‘stress relief’, say US soldiers
Neil Mackay, Sunday Herald
FOR the first time, American soldiers who personally tortured Iraqi prisoners have come forward to give testimony to human rights organisations about crimes they comm itted. Three soldiers – a captain and two sergeants – from the 82nd Airborne Division stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mercury near Fallujah in Iraq have told Human Rights Watch how prisoners were tortured both as a form of stress relief and as a way of breaking them for interrogation sessions…
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Iraqi Government Totters
US Goes it alone Against Mighty Sadah
British Leave Basra Base
Juan Cole, Informed Comment
…Let me now risk some more flack and say that given that it is two weeks before the referendum and no ordinary Iraqis have seen the text of the new constitution, and given that the Sunni Arabs reject it to a person even just from the little they know of it, this constitution is another sick joke played by the Bush administration, which keeps forcing Iraq to jump through hoops made in Washington as “milestones” and “tipping points” to which the Republican Party can point as progress. Not to mention that the draft we have all seen of the constitution is riddled with fatal contradictions that will tie up the energies of parliament and the courts for decades trying to resolve them…
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Is Time Running Out For Iran?
Abid Mustafa
On September 24 2005, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution to refer Iran to the UN Security Council over its nuclear programme. The 35-nation board of the IAEA in Vienna said that Iran has a ``long history of concealment and deception’’. The Bush administration immediately seized on IAEA’s decision and forecasted that it would eventually lead to Iran’s isolation. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said,” We have a patient long-term strategy. It’s to isolate Iran on this question; it’s to ratchet up the international pressure on Iran,’ and assemble the kind of global coalition against Iran…
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Another advantage of September 11
Xymphora
Former Shabak head Avi Dichter, a rising political star for the loonier side of Israeli politics, has revealed in a speech given at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution that the United States placed an embargo on selling helicopter parts to Israel from the start of the Second Intifada until the 9/11 attacks, based on the fact that the American-supplied helicopters were being used for targeted assassinations…
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Securitizing the Global Norm of Identity: Biometric Technologies in Domestic and Foreign Policy
Dahr Jamail’s Iraq Dispatches
In November 2004 the world watched – periodically, depending on the focus of the media gaze – as the US Marine Corps engaged so-called ‘insurgents’ in a brutal battle in Fallujah, Iraq. For all their high-tech weaponry, precision munitions, and exceptional training, in their search-and-destroy mission occupation forces all but obliterated Fallujah. During the month-long siege of Fallujah by American forces more than 200,000 residents fled the city. Out of these ruins, occupation forces argued they were erecting a ‘model city’, replete with a high-tech security infrastructure centered on biometric identification strategies to manage returning citizens. Returnees are fingerprinted, retina scanned, and issued a mandatory identity badge displaying the individual’s home address and collected biometric data…
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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Saturday, 1 October 2005
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. ( www.freearabvoice.org )
In a dispatch posted at 11:50am Mecca time Saturday morning, the correspondent for Mafkarat al-Islam in al-Qa’im near the Syrian border, reported that a short while before, US fighter bombers had attacked the nearby village of Sa‘dah. The correspondent reported that the US F-16 aircraft bombed or rocketed several homes in the village, killing 20 local residents, among them women and children. Four other civilians were wounded in the air raid…
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Eleven killed in Iraq attacks including imam, two US troops
AFP
Eleven people, including a Sunni imam and two US soldiers, were killed in attacks in the capital and northern Iraq on Saturday, security sources and the US military said. The soldiers were killed in separate bomb attacks, one in central Baghdad and the other near Baiji, some 200 kilometres (120 miles) north of the capital, the US military said, without providing further details…
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Mantra politics
William Bowles, I’n’I
It is well worth asking the following question: Why, specifically, was the phrase ‘war on terror’ adopted as a slogan by the US/UK authorities? This may seem a somewhat redundant question, after all, it describes in theory a response to the actions of ‘terrorists’, who are, we are told over and over again, bent on firstly, destroying Western ‘civilisation’ and then replacing it with a fundamentalist version of Islam. That such an idea is ludicrous, let alone unattainable even if every Islamic state on the planet united their forces and attacked the West, doesn’t of course, figure in the propaganda campaign of the West…
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Red Ink for Sulzberger and Judith Miller
Ahmed Amr: Editor NileMedia.com
…Far from being a reporter, Miller is a power player. She didn’t get together with Libby to ask a few innocent questions about Ambassador Joseph Wilson or Valerie Plame. Rather, she was plotting with Libby to contain the damage from Wilson’s accusations. Keep in mind that Wilson didn’t just throw water on the bogus ‘yellow uranium’ scam; he also questioned whether intelligence was being deliberately corrupted. He let it be known that there was no ‘intelligence failure’. Rather, there was an elaborate conspiracy to manufacture WMD fiction to justify a war against Iraq. Wilson can be credited with blowing the whistle long before the Downing Street memos…
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Time for Anti-War Movement to Escalate Efforts˜Build on Success
Make 2006 the Year of Anti-War Candidates
Kevin Zeese
Recent weeks have been mostly good news for the anti-war movement and mostly bad news for the ‘stay the course’ occupiers. The recent successes of the anti-war movement provide a foundation on which to build, too escalate efforts and let politicians who support the war know that their political careers are jeopardized by the failed Iraq policy. President Bush is predicting more violence in Iraq – he called an escalation likely but not to worry according to the ‘bring them on’ president: “Our troops are ready for it.” And Army Gen. George Casey, Jr. who had suggested this summer that the U.S. could begin a “fairly substantial” withdrawal of troops early next year took back that promise this week saying “we’re in a period of a little greater uncertainty”…
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Bolivar attends the Anti-war Protest in Washington (English and Spanish)
Les Blough, Editor, Axis of Logic
…The people in the United States are angry. They are angry with their government for killing over 100,000 Iraqi people in their name. They are angry with a government who has sent at least 1900 U.S. soldiers to early graves and 15,000 to hospitals in a war made for corporate profit. They are angry with their politicians who have attacked people in other countries without mercy and failed to protect their own people from poverty, disease and national disasters like Hurricane Katrina. On September 24, 2005, the people rose up with a show of force – 300,000 strong – without equal since the U.S. war on the people of Vietnam (…) As the protestors filed past the front doorstep of the White House they observed a father and daughter holding up a placard with a large photograph of President Hugo Chavez Frias…
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The CIA Leak Case: The Bush spinmeisters’ Kabuki dance with Patrick Fitzgerald
Wayne Madsen, Globalresearch
There is an interesting stylized dance taking place between the White House and Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor in the CIA leak case. For weeks, there have been rumors inside the Beltway that something big would be announced about the case during the last weeks of September. The silence and lack of substantial leaks were indications that a major turn of events would soon occur. Yesterday afternoon, the White House quickly swore in John G. Roberts as Chief Justice, just hours after his Senate confirmation. Rather than wait for the next morning and thus get two days of puff ball coverage by the media, the White House wanted to clear the calendar on Friday for a possible announcement by Fitzgerald. The White House, unsure of what might be coming from the prosecutor, floated the story that Bush would “definitely” name a replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor on Friday…
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Opening Up Jewish Eyes
Judy Andreas
…And so, I sit in a most unenviable position. I want to open the eyes of my brothers and sisters. I want to help my children learn of the sins of Israel and the important role it plays in the axis of evil…along with the U.S. and Great Britain. I want to alert my loved ones to the dangers of the Zionist behavior and how it is affecting our world. I want to wake up the ordinary Jewish person to the crimes that their leaders have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate…
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In Support of Weakness on National Security
David Swanson, AfterDowningStreet.org
A senior staff person for one of the most progressive and courageous members of Congress recently advised a room full of peace activists that they won’t be able to persuade Democrats to oppose the war simply by showing them polls finding that a majority of Americans oppose the war. Rather they must assuage the Democrats’ fears of being called “weak on national security”…
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Colonel blames Blair over Iraq ‘catastrophe’
Andy McSmith, The Independent
Lack of political leadership from Tony Blair is putting British troops at risk in Iraq, according to a former commander of the British invasion force. Britain could lose the war against Iraqi insurgents and risks being driven into neighbouring Iran. Colonel Tim Collins – famed for the speech he delivered to his men in the 1st Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment hours before they went into action in March 2003 – described the situation in Iraq now as “a right rollicking cock-up”…
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