A MAN OF INTEGRITY
Malcom Lagauche
In August, Jude Wanniski died suddenly at the age of 69. Many people of the left probably never heard of this man, but he was a giant in the area of integrity. Wanniski was a former assistant editor of the Wall Street Journal. His expertise was in the field of supply-side economics. In 1978, his book The Way Things Work was an instant success (…) Wanniski was probably the most vocal opponent of the U.S. intrusion into Iraq. He had written hundreds of columns on the issue. In fact, when he suffered his fatal heart attack, he was at his keyboard writing a piece about the occupation of Iraq. Wanniski pointed me in the right direction to research many matters. He was the first person of note to publicly state that Saddam Hussein was innocent of the charges of genocide. He lost many friends and acquaintances because of his views on Iraq, but he did not care. The truth was too important…

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Torture in Iraq
NYR Books, Volume 52, Number 17
Residents of Fallujah called them “the Murderous Maniacs” because of how they treated Iraqis in detention. They were soldiers of the US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, 1st Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment, stationed at Forward Operating Base Mercury (FOB Mercury) in Iraq. The soldiers considered this name a badge of honor. One officer and two noncommissioned officers (NCOs) of the 82nd Airborne who witnessed abuse, speaking on condition of anonymity, described in multiple interviews with Human Rights Watch how their battalion in 2003–2004 routinely used physical and mental torture as a means of intelligence gathering and for stress relief. One soldier raised his concerns within the Army chain of command for seventeen months before the Army agreed to undertake an investigation, but only after he had contacted members of Congress and considered going public with the story…

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The “ Oil for Food “ affair “I pay for my support to the Iraqi people…”
Statement by Gilles Munier
Secretary General of the French-Iraq Friendsdhip Organisation
After 60 hours of questioning and police custody, I was charged, on October 6, 2005, by Magistrate Philippe Courroye but released on a bail amounting to 80 000 euros or $ 96 600 which I have to pay in four instalments till February 2006 or be imprisoned. My passport has been withdrawn and I am forbidden to leave France (…) I am charged with violating UN Resolution 986 which had placed Iraq under embargo. However, no personal enrichment has been held against me. Similarly, I had been questioned by members of the United Nations Commission (Volcker Commission) the week before whose report will be released end of October. (…) To me, the United Nations resolutions were illegal and tantamount to a genocide. Therefore, any decision taken by the Iraqi government to bypass the embargo and alleviate the sufferings of the people was legitimate. The Iraqi leaders always claimed that they had no arm of massive destruction. As a consequence, I considered it my duty and my right to come to the rescue of the Iraqi people condemned to death as I considered it to be in the interest of France…

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The ploy of the Iraqi referendum
Elias Akleh
The Iraqi referendum had been played so cleverly that all types of media, although most British papers were more cautious than others, and all political figures could not but call it an expression of democracy. Yet this “democracy” is being used to manipulate Iraqis into accepting the dictates of the American administration. The American power elite has been very proficient in this type of manipulation; after all, they had used the same tactics for almost 227 years since the establishment of the American Constitution, to impose their own ideologies on the people, and make them believe that these ideologies are their very own…

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NIGER-GATE: THE SCANDAL BEHIND THE SCANDAL
Michael Rivero, of WhatReallyHappened.com
In his January 28, 2003 State of the Union Speech, President Bush uttered 16 words that have since come back to haunt him. “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Bush was quoting a statement by the British, “There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Iraq has no active civilian nuclear power programme or nuclear power plants and therefore has no legitimate reason to acquire uranium.” This quotes came from a document issued by Number 10 Downing Street titled, “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The assessment of the British Government”. This document has since become more widely known as the “Dodgy Dossier” following exposure that it was written from plagiarized student thesis papers…

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Voting in Afghanistan; warlords, jihadis, and Iranian-agents
Mike Whitney
…It is widely believed that Tehran is directly supporting the more extreme members in the fledgling parliament. This tells us that Iran is developing a base of political support in Afghanistan as it has in Iraq. Ironically, the US is currently defending Iran-friendly regimes in both countries it has chosen to invade. After 4 years of occupation, we can see that the administration’s promises for Afghanistan were all lies. The military has never tried to liberate the countryside from the tyranny of the warlords, nor has Bush’s promise of a Marshall Plan ever materialized. The Karzai government is a feeble puppet-regime with no popular base and with no real power beyond the confines of Kabul…

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The Dangerously Incomplete Hariri Report
Robert Parry
A new United Nations report implicates the Syrian government in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, giving a lift to George W. Bush’s demand for “regime change” in Damascus. But the investigation has many holes, including failure to follow up on a mysterious van connected to the Feb. 14 bombing. The 54-page U.N. report concludes that the bomb that killed Hariri and 22 other people in Beirut was likely in a white Mitsubishi Canter Van that closed in on the convoy of cars carrying Hariri and his entourage before a suicide bomber detonated the powerful blast…

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Kiss your Democracy Goodbye (But Did You Ever Have One?)
William Bowles, I’n’I
…The role of the ‘war on terror’ therefore, is to justify a state that has lost all legitimacy and must perforce rule by force, admittedly without recourse to an English equivalent of the SS and given the fact that the majority of the citizens have opted out of a political process over which they have no say, won’t be needed – yet; except of course to repress those who fulfill the role of ‘enemies of the state’, Muslims, ‘extremists’ and other malcontents, who can be safely handled by existing organs of the state, MI5, MI6 and the various and sundry ‘security’ services (in authoritarian regimes, they get called the secret police) all administered with the ‘anti-terror’ laws. Throw in a complicit corporate and state media, which is only too happy to maintain the illusion of a democracy and we have a ‘very English’ police state…

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Blasts rock Baghdad, Kirkuk
The Australian
THREE car bombs and several roadside bombs hit US and Iraqi security forces in Baghdad and the northern city of Kirkuk overnight, killing at least eight people and wounding dozens more, Iraqi police said. US commanders have warned of more attacks in the run-up to December 15 elections that they fear insurgents will try to disrupt. The US military death toll in Iraq is approaching 2,000, focusing attention on the security situation more than two-and-a-half years after the US-led invasion. The toll stood at 1,996 after the overnight attacks…

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Blasts halt north Iraq oil exports to Turkey
Reuters
Four sabotage blasts have brought oil exports from northern Iraq to a halt and repairs could take up to one month to carry out, an oil official said on Sunday. “The exports to Ceyhan (Turkey) have stopped completely because of four blasts that hit a main gathering centre for at least four fields,” the official told Reuters. He said that oil from Kirkuk, Janbour, Bay Hassan, Khabaz and other northern fields were gathered at the centre…

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Gassing Iraqis: Karen Hughes Tells a Big Lie
Kurt Nimmo, Another day in the empire
Karen Hughes, Bush’s propaganda minister on call, is apparently a habitual liar. Hughes, visiting Jakarta, Indonesia, in an effort to “repair the image” of the United States, an image seriously hemorrhaging thanks to the duplicitous neocons, was called out earlier this week. “Saddam Hussein had gassed to death ‘hundreds of thousands’ of his own people,” Hughes told the hand-picked students, according to the Associated Press. “Hughes twice repeated the statement after being challenged by journalists. A State Department official later called The Associated Press to say she misspoke.” In other words, the State Department admitted she had used an exposed and threadbare lie. Obviously, it is difficult for the Bushites, who like to tell us they alone fashion reality, to stop using discredit lies. As we know, even the US Army War College admits there is no evidence Saddam gassed the Kurds…

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Insurgency still strong after referendum
UPI
The Iraq referendum last Saturday did not take the wind out of the insurgency there. On the contrary, the rate of casualties inflicted upon U.S. and allied Iraq troops actually increased significantly in the following days. Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, continued to account for more than half the total casualties inflicted on U.S. troops — an ominous indicator that the technical expertise of the insurgents is steadily advancing…

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Sorry, Judy… Everybody Didn’t Get it Wrong on WMD
Arianna Huffington
In the Times’ Sunday Judy-Culpa, Judy Miller said of her woeful pre-war reporting: “WMD — I got it totally wrong… The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them — we were all wrong.” To which a growing number of journalists are responding: No, we weren’t…

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Miller’s Tale – Can the reporter–or the New York Times–be trusted?
FAIR Media Advisory
The New York Times editorial page told readers over and over again that Times reporter Judith Miller went to jail for 85 days for a noble cause–the protection of confidential sources. But to many outside observers, the principles that Miller went to jail for were far from clear, with many fundamental questions left unanswered. Readers and media watchers were eager to hear Miller’s side of the story, and to see the newspaper devote its considerable journalistic energy to investigating a crucial political story that its reporter was in the middle of: the efforts of Bush administration officials to punish a critic by leaking the covert identity of Valerie Plame Wilson to the media. But neither the October 16 report written by a team of Times reporters, nor the accompanying first-person tale written by Miller herself, answered the questions posed by critics. In fact, those questions have only multiplied…

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America’s Asian Empire: Aggression, A-Bombs and Other Atrocities
Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers
Once a rational person realizes that our government has lied or bent the truth – as all governments do – in order to look better or to present matters in a more flattering light, then one will begin to see everything differently, including current events. Naturally, the consideration of any question of how humans will act in or react to a given situation requires the use of one’s common sense; it makes sense that any government would try to make itself look better by hiding the truth from the public. This article is another exercise in asking the reader to consider events leading up to and concerning World War II, while using historical fact and common sense in the consideration of these events. The purported reasons for war – any war – as presented by a government for public consumption are obviously quite different than the real reasons. Just one moment’s consideration of the details surrounding the current debacle in Iraq should make this fact of life apparent…

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Journalist Dahr Jamail draws capacity crowd for Iraq update
Jennifer McNulty
…As part of his presentation, Jamail screened a new independent film, Caught in the Crossfire: The Untold Story of Falluja. The film’s footage of the suffering of displaced residents and the decimation of the city, 60 percent of which was bombed to the ground by U.S. forces last November, had prompted the young boy’s query. Today, U.S. commanders in Iraq compare battling Iraqi resistance to stepping on a half-filled water balloon, said Jamail, “You step on one part, and it squeezes out the other side”…

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Spanish court orders arrest of US soldiers for war crime
Warrant issued in killing of cameraman José Couso
Bill Van Auken, WSWS
A Spanish judge issued an international warrant Wednesday calling for the arrest and extradition to Spain of three US Army personnel in connection with the April 8, 2003 killing of television cameraman José Couso in Iraq. The arrest warrant stems from the shelling on that date of Baghdad’s Hotel Palestine, where over 100 international journalists were staying during the US invasion of Iraq. A tank round fired into the hotel’s 15th floor fatally wounded Couso, a 37-year-old cameraman for the Spanish network Telecinco, and Taras Protsyuk, 35, a Ukrainian cameraman who worked for the British news agency Reuters…

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Seymour Hersh and Scott Ritter on Iraq, WMDs and the Role of the Clinton Administration in the 1990s
Democracy Now!
…The United States needed to find a vehicle to continue to contain Saddam, because the C.I.A. said, “All we have to do is wait six months, and Saddam’s going to collapse on his own volition.” That vehicle is sanctions. They needed a justification. The justification was disarmament, but understand that a Chapter 7 resolution of the United Nations Security Council calling for the disarmament of Iraq and saying in Paragraph 14 that if Iraq complies, sanctions will be lifted. Within months of this resolution being passed – and the United States was a drafter and voted in favor of this resolution- within months, the President, George Herbert Walker Bush, and his Secretary of State James Baker were saying publicly, not privately, publicly, that even if Iraq complies with its obligation to disarm, economic sanctions will be maintained until which time Saddam Hussein is removed from power…

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They Are Not Numbers
Cindy Sheehan
I received this email the other day. I have removed the names: Dear Ms. Sheehan ~ I wasn’t sure how else to contact you, so am sending this thru the gsfp website. I just want to thank you for posting your essay entitled, ‘A Peaceful Day’ dated October 17th on the commondreams.org website, a site I visit every weekday. My cousin, “brave soldier”, 30, originally of Indiana, was one of the five U.S. soldiers killed on Saturday, October 15th — Iraq’s ‘peaceful day.’ He is survived by his wife, his two children, his parents, his sister, our grandma, his aunt, his two uncles and his two cousins. We are currently awaiting confirmation per dna identification…

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Violence in Iraq – Conspiracy to destroy Iraq
Truth About Iraqis
…By the way, during the January elections, Iraqi resistance groups distributed a flyer saying they would not participate in any attacks against Iraqi civilians at the polls. Who then attacked the civilians? Iraq has been under the glaring eyes of many since 1972, the year Saddam Hussein nationalised the oil industry, much to the chagrin of the British. The following year trouble began to brew in the north of the country…

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9/11 Theologian Says Controlled Demolition of World Trade Center Is Now a Fact, Not a Theory
Globalresearch.ca
In two speeches to overflow crowds in New York last weekend, notable theologian David Ray Griffin argued that recently revealed evidence seals the case that the Twin Towers and WTC-7 were destroyed by controlled demolition with explosives. Despite the many enduring mysteries of the 9/11 attacks, Dr. Griffin concluded, “It is already possible to know, beyond a reasonable doubt, one very important thing: the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job, orchestrated by terrorists within our own government”…

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Poll: Iraqis Support Attacking Occupation Troops
Kurt Nimmo, Another day in the empire
In Britain, it takes a Ministry of Defense poll to figure out the obvious: the average Iraqi hates the British, hates the occupation, and “up to 65 per cent of Iraqi citizens support attacks” against British and American troops. “The nationwide survey also suggests that the coalition has lost the battle to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, which Tony Blair and George W Bush believed was fundamental to creating a safe and secure country,” reports the Sunday Telegraph.

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Fast Car – Shadows On A Lonesome Road
John Kaminski
…The level of reality of most of antiwar activity in the United States basically accepts the government’s version of 9/11 and focuses its objection on the unnecessary carnage taking place all over the world thanks to U.S. policies, which of course is not a bad thing to complain about. But missing the point about the nature of the war and who is creating the violence — it’s not the neocons, it’s the vast majority of the American people who support them who are letting this happen — guarantees yet another useless and failed effort on the part of America’s peaceniks, because they simply do not see the lies that have been told by the White House and TV talking heads have twisted the way everyone sees things…

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Saddam’s Lawyer Refrains from Traveling to Amman Due to Fear
Al Sharq Al Awsat
A member of the defense team of the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein stated that Khalil Al Dulaimi, the lawyer for Saddam, who was supposed to arrive in Amman for arranging a work plan, has cancelled his trip, “for security reasons.” Essam Ghazawi, a Jordanian lawyer, said to AFP, “Khalil Al Dulaimi has refrained from coming to Jordan for security reasons.” Ghazawi referred to what he described as “deliberate administrative complications on the Iraqi side that prevented Khalil from leaving to Amman on Friday”…

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Pravda.ru
Freedom and democracy? Or torture and murder? What does the United States of America stand for today? After Abu Ghraib, shocking revelations reach us of Taleban bodies being burnt and placed facing Mecca and Saddam Hussein being subjected to torture. The United States of America of George W. Bush makes a mockery of his country’s culture, history and Constitution. Far from being the land of the free, the land where dreams come true, George Bush’s Washington is the Great American Nightmare. With its foreign policy dictated by a clique of conservative corporate elitists, the procedure followed by Washington today is one of bullying, belligerence, deception, deceit, lies, mass murder, criminal negligence, criminal and wanton destruction of civilian structures with military hardware, war crimes and increasingly, torture…

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Stomping on To Syria
Chris Floyd
With Rice pounding on Syria all last week and now Bolton and Bush leaping on the Syrialiban bandwagon – the thumping drumbeat to expand the bloody war is continuing to echo throughout DC this week. As soon as the UN report on the death of Hariri came out the heat on Syria became even more palpable and has escalated. Of course none of this matters perhaps – since Rice recently told the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee that expansion of the war was not off the table and would not rule out Bush hitting Syria and Iran next without Congress in his pocket. Could it somehow be covered under Bush’s enhanced dictatorial rights bovinely passed for Iraq after 9-11?…

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The “Stinky Inky,” Part 2
Walter C. Uhler
Were one to read Davis Merritt’s recent book, Knightfall: Knight Ridder and How the Erosion of Newspaper Journalism is Putting Democracy at Risk, he or she would realize that the reasons for The Philadelphia Inquirer’s deterioration extend far beyond the irredeemable right-wing slop that so often besmirches its Commentary page. Merritt’s insights take on added significance, given the recently announced editorial staff reductions that have shaken the Inky. But they must await my future evaluation, because the Inky’s stinky Commentary page of October 20, 2005 demands an immediate response. Stinky? Yes, simply consider its outrageously uniformed and insipid right-wing essays by Kathleen Parker and Jonah Goldberg . . . First, a cheerleading Ms. Parker asked why no newspaper headlines read: “Iraqi democracy takes bow to standing ovation, global applause.” After all, “What matters is, they voted. They went to the polls and practiced democracy.” Oh, really?

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US troops fighting losing battle for Sunni triangle
Adrian Blomfield
…But hopes for progress are growing more remote. The insurgency in eastern Salahuddin province is growing more intense, more deadly and more sophisticated. Lt Col Gary Brito, the battalion’s commanding officer, said that in recent months the number of roadside bombs targeting his men had increased by a third – even though journeys out of base have been cut back. They are having a more devastating effect too…

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One victory, another ongoing struggle
Campus military recruiters in hot water
Bryan G. Pfeifer
After being “banned” from campus, Charles Peterson has been reinstated at Holyoke Community College. This victory for the entire counter-recruitment and anti-war movement came only after massive worldwide support for Peterson and resistance actions, including a march and rally on campus Oct. 6. The attempt to bar Peterson from the campus where he studies and works came after a counter-recruiting action there on Sept. 29. He and other members of the HCC Anti-War coalition were brutalized and Maced by campus and state cops as they were protesting Army National Guard recruiting at the student cafeteria…

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Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Saturday, 22 October 2005
Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice.
…Shi’i sectarian Badr Brigade forces on Saturday morning carried out house-to-house raids on Sunni residents of the southern Iraqi city of an-Nasiriyah, robbing the householders of their valuables and arresting more than 70 individuals without charge. It was the second day of sectarian raids and robberies. The Mafkarat al-Islam correspondent reported that 17 bodies of Sunni citizens, meanwhile, have been found mutilated with signs of torture from burning with fire, electricity and boiling water on them…

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Throwing Miller and Libby Overboard is Not Enough
Arianna Huffington
So the New York Times has finally decided to throw Judy Miller overboard. The lambasting that began with Bill Keller’s memo and continued with Maureen Dowd’s column, has now culminated with Byron Calame’s Public Editor column. But everything the Times is now castigating Miller for was well known, or easily knowable, weeks and months ago when the paper was lionizing her as the Joan of Sag Harbor…

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U.S. hides the death of 4 Halliburton contractors in Iraq
Aljazeera.com
The U.S. military confirmed Saturday that four American contractors have been killed last month in the Iraqi town of Duluiyah when their convoy came under gunmen attack, The Boston Globe reported Sunday. Senior U.S. military commander confirmed the report, but he provided no reason why the military had not released information on the attack earlier…

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GI Special 3C91: 45% Of Iraqis Want U.S. Troops Dead
www.militaryproject.org
Forty-five percent of Iraqis believe attacks on U.S. and British troops are justified, according to a secret poll said to have been commissioned by British defense leaders and cited by The Sunday Telegraph. [In case you’re wondering, 45% is about 7 million Iraqis, if you subtract kids too young to bear arms. Seven million vs. 140,000 occupation troops. Do you like those odds? There is not the slightest hope of defeating the Iraqi resistance. There is only endless death in a war already lost commanded by Imperial politicians in Washington DC too cowardly and murderous to admit it. They must all go, peacefully if possible, by any means necessary if not. Be aware, the patience of the troops is not inexhaustible, and as Vietnam showed, if the politicians won’t end a hopeless, lost war, our troops will stop the slaughter by acting for themselves.]…

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CIA Escapes With Impunity Over Prisoner Deaths: Report
IslamOnline.net
CIA officers and contract workers have tortured Iraqi and Afghan prisoners to death with seeming impunity as they likely to escape criminal charges in all of the reported deaths, a leading US newspaper revealed on Sunday, October 23 . Federal prosecutors reviewing cases of possible misconduct by CIA employees in both countries had notified lawyers they did not intend to bring criminal charges in several cases involving the handling of terrorism suspects and Iraqi resistance fighters, The New York Times reported…

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GI Special 3C90: Dead In New Mexico – October 23, 2005
www.militaryproject.org/
Veterans groups and House Democrats blasted VA plans to review all post-traumatic stress disorder claims because of irregularities in their compensation system, calling it insulting to heroes who have served their country. “To the VA, this is simply a process seeking out voids in paperwork,” said Rep. Tom Udall, D-N.M., at a Thursday hearing on Capitol Hill. “But to veterans, it’s a jolting realization that their day-to-day struggles are being questioned again.” [C]ritics called it a way for the department to save money by shirking its duty to care for disabled veterans. Quentin Kinderman, deputy director of legislative service for the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, called the IG report flawed and the proposed review a waste of money…

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IRAQ: Basra incident exposes the real foreign terrorists
Louay Alzaher
Last month, “civilised” Britain troops revenged themselves on the police headquarters of Basra city, because the police had arrested two British commandos, disguised in traditional Iraqi dress, who had fired on Iraqi police, killing one officer. Using six tanks, in the early hours of September 19 the British Army not only destroyed the Basra central police headquarters, but also smashed all signs of Iraqi national sovereignty under their wheels. When the two commandos were arrested on September 17, the car in which they were travelling contained explosives, remote triggering devices, a mortar, two automatic guns and a sniper gun equipped with a night-vision scope…

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Americans must start protesting the Bush regime’s international terrorism
Zack Krasuk
…On January 27, 2005, Venezuela’s acting ambassador to Paraguay, Elmer Nino, publicly stated that Venezuela’s government has physical proof that the Bush regime has plans for a possible invasion of Venezuela. Reasons for such an invasion are of course, financial, just like the Iraq War was. Venezuela’s case would be all the more apparent however: the US is having less trade with Venezuela and juicy deals are now impossible to achieve since the days of foreign exploitation of the local populace are long gone. The US has its eyes set on the vast oil, gas, and gold reserves of Venezuela. Should the Bush regime try to commit an act such as that, which violates international law, just like the invasion of Iraq, it is to be noted that the Venezuelan people are united in their struggle to ending foreign dominance and exploitation and shall be willing to fight to the bitter end…

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Iraqi bar association urges boycott of Saddam court
Reuters
The Iraqi Bar Association on Sunday urged lawyers to stop working with the special court hearing the case against Saddam Hussein until the murder of a member of the defense team is solved. The association also passed a resolution calling a one-day strike for Wednesday to protest the killing of Saadoun Janabi, who was bundled out of his Baghdad office last Thursday by heavily-armed men and later found dead of gunshot wounds…

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Pyrrhus Without His Victory
Bush the Strategist
BRIAN CLOUGHLEY
At the moment there are some 154,000 US troops in Iraq. That seems a lot. It is, after all, about the population of Fort Lauderdale (FLA), Syracuse (NY) or Kansas City (KS). It’s only a tad more than the usual attendance at the Kentucky Derby, which is a pretty big gathering of people. But it doesn’t mean there are 154,000 rifle-wielding soldiers and marines available to combat the insurgents. Far from it. For Bush to claim that he will “clear out enemy forces” city by city is absurd because there are not enough US troops to do so. And that is exactly what his incompetent defense secretary and even more grotesque assistant defense secretary were told in plain words by the army’s chief, General Shinseki, who informed them that occupying Iraq would require several hundred thousand soldiers…

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British military investigator found hung in Basra
Julie Hyland, WSWS
A senior British military police officer in Iraq, Captain Ken Masters, was found hung in his military accommodation in Basra on October 15. Masters was commander of the Royal Military Police‚s Special Investigations Branch (SIB), charged with investigating allegations of mistreatment of Iraqi civilians by British soldiers. According to the Independent newspaper, in this capacity Masters “had examined almost every single serious allegation of abuse of Iraqi civilians by British troops,” including “the cases of the fusiliers convicted of abusing prisoners at Camp Breadbasket near Basra and a paratrooper who has been charged in connection with the death of Baha Mousa, a hotel receptionist.” In recent weeks, Masters was thought to have been involved in the investigation into the events of September 19, when Iraqi police arrested two British undercover Special Air Service (SAS) officers in Basra…

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Will the French Indict Cheney?
Doug Ireland
Yet another sordid chapter in the murky annals of Halliburton might well lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney by a French court on charges of bribery, money-laundering and misuse of corporate assets. At the heart of the matter is a $6 billion gas liquification factory built in Nigeria on behalf of oil mammoth Shell by Halliburton—the company Cheney headed before becoming Vice President—in partnership with a large French petroengineering company, Technip. Nigeria has been rated by the anticorruption watchdog Transparency International as the second-most corrupt country in the world, surpassed only by Bangladesh…

www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=17058&s2=24

The Show Trial of the Century
Trial of Saddam diverts attention from US-UK war crimes
Ghali Hassan, GlobalResearch.ca
President Saddam Hussein’s “trial” before a U.S.-orchestrated Kangaroo Court is hailed as the “trial of the century”. Those who committed the crimes are rewarded and protected, while their victims are put on a show trial. It is not Saddam who is on trial; it is the international legal system (…) Saddam trial is a theatre. It is a Hollywood show to divert attention from the destruction of Iraq and the massive war crimes committed against the Iraqi people. Like the invasion, the “tribunal” is illegal and has no legitimacy in occupied Iraq. There is overwhelming prima facie evidence to convict George W. Bush and Tony Blair of crimes against humanity than to convict Saddam Hussein. Under the U.N Convention, Bush and Blair are guilty of crimes against humanity, torture, and guilty of wanton destruction of the Iraqi state (…) It is not Saddam who is guilty of crimes against humanity; Bush and Blair are…

www.uruknet.info/?s1=1&p=16924&s2=2