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Basra Shadowlands
Sarah Meyer
…Fattah al-Shaykh continued : “the sons of Basra caught two non-Iraqis, who seem to be Britons and were in a car of the Cressida type. It was a booby-trapped car laden with ammunition and was meant to explode in the centre of the city of Basra in the popular market. However, the sons of the city of Basra arrested them. They [the two non-Iraqis] then fired at the people there and killed some of them. The two arrested persons are now at the Intelligence Department in Basra, and they were held by the National Guard force, but the British occupation forces are still surrounding this department in an attempt to absolve them of the crime.” (…) On the day following Basra vs. The British, I opened the The Web of Deceit by Mark Curtis 1, to where I had left off, ‘Explaining the War Against Terrorism,’ which describes British undercover operations…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16430&s2=05
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Another Victim
the woman i was
A new black banner in our area mourns the martyr Atheer Abdul Khalik Al-Tarfy, 25 years old who was killed by dirty criminals. I saw the banner yesterday; Atheer was killed two days ago. Atheer was on his way home coming from Baghdad. He was in a minibus with 10 other passengers. In Al-Udhaim, the town about 110km north of Baghdad, they should slow down because of an American patrol. Americans has the right of firing any car alleging self defense; especially Al-Udhaim is a dangerous place for the Americans. All of sudden one of the Americans humvees stopped. One of its wheels needed to be changed. The driver of the minibus did know what to do. They are going to shot his minibus if he would stop. So he decided to drive slowly; as soon as he became close to the Americans; one American soldier opened his fire right and left killing 9 passengers; Atheer was one of them…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16423&s2=05
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Another British person captured in Iraq
Truth About Iraqis
Let’s kick off today with a report from Aljazeera that a British man by the name of Colin Peter was captured by Iraqi border guards in the south of the country: “We can confirm that a UK national has been arrested by the Iraqi department of border enforcement,” a British military spokesman said, adding that the Foreign Office was investigating the arrest, which was believed to have taken place on Monday night. An Iraqi border guard spokesman in Najaf, Saadun al-Jaabari, said guards arrested “a terrorist group consisting of 10 people, including one British national called Colin Peter, near Mathlum, near the Saudi border”…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16424&s2=05
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Abu Ghraib: Business as Usual
Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire
In the aftermath of Private First Class Lynndie England’s conviction for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, she has told NBC’s Dateline “I know worse things were happening over there.” In her first post-court-martial interview, England “said one night she heard blood-curdling screams coming from the block’s shower room, where non-military interrogators had taken an Arab detainee,” reports Yahoo News. “The interrogators were not identified, but several investigations into the abuse have disclosed that Central Intelligence Agency operatives worked at Abu Ghraib alongside US military intelligence, mining for useful information…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16434&s2=05
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The cost of the lies and the price of truth
John Kaminski
Eric Hoffer was right. The first thing people do with freedom is put themselves in jail. Here’s your question. What is the true cost of all the lies? Nimble minds would immediately respond “$2 billion per week in Iraq, $1 billion per month in Afghanistan, $14 trillion per year for Israel, counting all the labyrinthine corporate perks … “ and continue chattering through a long list that ends somewhere around trillions being made on poisons that are put into bottles and sold as medicine. You get the general idea that a considerable amount of spare change disappears in the blink of an eye as the cost of doing business in the world of official lies…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16429&s2=05
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Caligula’s Horse and the Emperor Dubya’s Supreme Court
Gabriele Zamparini, The Cat’s Dream
There is a dispute of whether Emperor Caligula made his horse a senator but it’s certain that two thousand years later Emperor Dubya nominated his personal lawyer to the Supreme Court (…) In the same hours, in another palace of Rome… oops… I mean, Washington, DC, the Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s Court was being inaugurated. Chief Justice Roberts took the chair of his mentor and predecessor, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. “It was one month to the day since Chief Justice Rehnquist died. The flags on the court plaza, in fact, were still flying at half staff…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16445&s2=05
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We Will Not Be Intimidated
Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, OrbStandard
…This student movement is significant, because it is students who are targeted daily by military recruiters asking us to leave school and become the next round of cannon fodder in a war most of us oppose. And it is the rising opposition to war among young people, and the grassroots counter-recruitment movement that began to take shape on campuses last spring, that has put the Army in its worst recruiting slump since 1979. And yet events of the last week make it clear that students’ right to dissent from the war, and from the recruitment taking place on our campuses, remains in question. At three different colleges in the last week — Holyoke Community College, George Mason University, and UW-Madison — students engaging in peaceful counter-recruitment were met with police repression. At Holyoke and George Mason, students face ongoing charges from the school or the state…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16447&s2=05
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US Policymakers Despair of Iraqi Army
Martin Sieff, United Press International
US politicians and policymakers’ perceptions towards the Iraq war have reached another tipping point: There is now a widespread recognition shared among senior uniformed US military officers and Washington foreign policy analysts that plans to rapidly build up the Iraqi army as a new, independent effective fighting force have failed disastrously. The Senate heard testimony last week from some of America’s top generals that the war in Iraq is going worse than ever and that only 1 out of 119 Iraqi army and security battalions can operate by itself in combat situations without US military backup…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16446&s2=05
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IRAQ: More civilians flee al-Qaim as US offensive continues
IRIN
More than 900 Iraqi families have fled from the al-Qaim district near the Syrian border to escape a US military offensive against Islamic militants and the exodus is continuing, humanitarian workers in al-Qaim said. Most of those running to escape the five day-old offensive by 1,000 US troops backed by warplanes have remained within Iraq. However, several hundred have crossed the nearby border to seek sanctuary in Syria, according to residents in the eastern Syrian town of Deir-ez-Zour contacted by IRIN…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16448&s2=05
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Did Bush administration attack peace movement with military grade biological bacteria?
Bob Fitrakis
Washington D.C. Public Health Director Greg A. Pane posed the right question in the Post article, “Why that day? That’s what is not explained.” Pane pointed that it was “just this 24-hour period and none since.” The Post noted that Pane found “. . . it was puzzling that the finding was from a day when the mall was packed with people.” Puzzling? Indeed. Biohazard sensors detected tularemia bacteria at the mall on Saturday, September 24…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16441&s2=05
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WHAT IS A CITIZEN?
Malcom Lagauche
Last week, an acquaintance made a curious statement to me. He opposed the illegal invasion of Iraq until the bullets started flying and then he became a part of the “I support our troops” brigade of millions of Americans. I differed with his opinion, but everybody is entitle to one. His next statement threw me off. He said, “I guess there must be a head sheriff to keep the world in order…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16440&s2=05
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Bush’s Dilemma
www.rense.com
Bush and his vindicators still insist that that the occupation of Iraq would spread democracy and stability in the Middle East. That naïve declaration couldn”t be farther from the truth. Not only is Iraq in the clutches of a civil war, the US-led invasion threatens to destabilise the whole of the Middle East, if not possibly the world. It might have irrevocably done so already…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16437&s2=05
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Blood, Sweat & Tears: Asia’s Poor Build U.S. Bases in Iraq
David Phinney, Special to CorpWatch
Jing Soliman left his family in the Philippines for what sounded like a sure thing—a job as a warehouse worker at Camp Anaconda in Iraq. His new employer, Prime Projects International (PPI) of Dubai, is a major, but low-profile, subcontractor to Halliburton’s multi-billion-dollar deal with the Pentagon to provide support services to U.S. forces. But Soliman wouldn’t be making anything near the salaries— starting $80,000 a year and often topping $100,000— that Halliburton’s engineering and construction unit, Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) pays to the truck drivers, construction workers, office workers, and other laborers it recruits from the United States. Instead, the 35-year-old father of two anticipated $615 a month – including overtime…
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War Porn
What the Gruesome Images Say
JOHN CHUCKMAN, CounterPunch
There is an Internet site that displays extraordinarily gruesome photographs taken by American soldiers in Iraq. Apparently, the owner of the site exchanges access to pornography for soldiers sending him their war pictures. Digital cameras and the Internet are now providing a real glimpse of war to an American public that still daydreams about fresh-faced boys and girls marching off to do brave deeds on behalf of democracy…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16436&s2=05
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A Lesson from Roman History
An Earlier Empire’s War on Iraq
GARY LEUPP, CounterPunch
The Roman emperor Trajan reigned from 98 to 117 and brought the empire to its maximum extent. He is generally considered to be one of the “good emperors” who ruled from 96 to 180, and indeed his administration was marked by relative tolerance (towards Christians, for example) and efficiency. Among his mistakes, however, was an attack on the Parthian Empire beginning in 115 or 116. He personally led his troops into Mesopotamia (what we now call Iraq) capturing the capital of Ctesiphon on the Tigris near modern Baghdad. He reached the Persian Gulf and in Edward Gibbon’s words, “enjoyed the honour of being the first, as he was the last, of the Roman generals, who ever navigated that remote sea.” A man of boundless ambition, he dreamed of sailing from there to far-off India…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16435&s2=05
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When Terrorism Outlaws Democracy – Australians Lose Rights for Ten Years
Wanda Fish*, Axis of Logic
On September 27, 2005, Australian democracy surrendered to terrorism. On that day, a coalition of willing federal and state leaders agreed to anti-terrorism legislation that will enable police persecution of the Muslim community and threaten dissidents with imprisonment. In a country without a Bill of Rights, the prospect of more draconian Terror Laws delivers ultimate control through fear. Australia, with its history of penal colonies, racism and detention centers, is now set to become a police state…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16433&s2=05
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UN condemns Iraq charter change
BBCNews
The United Nations has criticised changes to Iraq’s electoral law that make it harder for Iraqis to reject the draft constitution. The two-thirds majority needed in three provinces to defeat the constitution will now be counted from all registered – as opposed to actual – voters. On Sunday Shia and Kurdish members of parliament pushed through the changes in the referendum rules on 15 October…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16432&s2=05
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Gitmo’s Shame
Peter Rothberg
You would hardly know it from watching the news or reading the papers, but there’s a two-month-old hunger strike going on at Guantánamo Bay. After more than three years of internment without charges or trials, approximately forty detainees are striking for the right to a fair hearing before a judge…
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Five US troops killed in western Iraq during assault on insurgents
AFX News
Five US troops were killed in western Iraq yesterday, the US military said, as coalition forces pushed an assault in the rebel heartland close to the Syrian border. A marine died in a bomb attack in Karabilah during Operation ‘Iron Fist’, one of two large-scale anti-insurgency sweeps in the area, a statement said today…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16422&s2=05
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GI Special 3C72: “I Don’t Feel Like There’s A Cause” – October 4, 2005
www.militaryproject.org
…”Some people don’t get the gravity of the situation here; people in the `green zone’ are always trying to paint a rosy picture,’’ said Molina, a 27-year-old sniper from Clearwater, Fla. He was referring to the fortified compound in Baghdad where U.S. officials work. “These politicians are all about sending people to war but they don’t know what it’s all about, being over here and getting shot at, walking through swamps, having bombs go off, hearing bullets fly by. They have no idea what that’s like.’’…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16421&s2=05
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The Iraqis Rights to be Free
Ghali Hassan
With the continuing US attacks on Iraqi population centres, the Bush administration appeared more desperate than ever to force the new US-crafted constitution on the Iraqi people. The attacks are concentrated on Iraqi communities, who oppose the Occupation, to prevent them from voting on the constitution in the upcoming referendum. The US aim is to divide Iraqis on sectarian and ethnic lines and force them into neo-colonial dependency. It is the Iraqi people’s legitimate rights to fight for their unity, freedom and national independence…
www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16419&s2=05
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