Declaration of the Jury of Conscience World Tribunal on Iraq - Istanbul
It is two years later now. Iraq has been invaded, occupied, and devastated. The attack on Iraq is an attack on justice, on liberty, on our safety, on our future, on us all. We, people of conscience, decided to stand up. We formed the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) to demand justice and a peaceful future.
... Overview of Findings
1. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was and is illegal. The reasons given by the US and UK governments for the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003 have proven to be false. Much evidence supports the conclusion that a major motive for the war was to control and dominate the Middle East and its vast reserves of oil as a part of the US drive for global hegemony.
2. Blatant falsehoods about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and a link between Al Qaeda terrorism and the Saddam Hussein régime were manufactured in order to create public support for a “preemptive” assault upon a sovereign independent nation.
...
Charges Against the Governments of the US and the UK
1. Planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles. Evidence for this can be found in the leaked Downing Street Memo of 23 rd July, 2002, in which it was revealed: “Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Intelligence was manufactured to willfully deceive the people of the US, the UK, and their elected representatives.
Bush Admin Covering Up The Truth About Abu Ghraib
... the former warden of Abu Ghraib, Maj. David DiNenna, testified that the use of dogs for interrogation was recommended by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the former commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison who was dispatched by the Pentagon to Abu Ghraib in August 2003 to review the handling and interrogation of prisoners. On Tuesday, a military interrogator testified that he had been trained in using dogs by a team sent to Iraq by Gen. Miller.
In statements to investigators and in sworn testimony to Congress last year, Gen. Miller denied that he recommended the use of dogs for interrogation, or that they had been used at Guantanamo. "No methods contrary to the Geneva Convention were presented at any time by the assistance team that I took to [Iraq]," he said under oath on May 19, 2004. Yet Army investigators reported to Congress this month that, under Gen. Miller's supervision at Guantanamo, an al Qaeda suspect named Mohamed Qahtani was threatened with snarling dogs, forced to wear women's underwear on his head and led by a leash attached to his chains -- the very abuse documented in the Abu Ghraib photographs.
The court evidence strongly suggests that Gen. Miller lied about his actions, and it merits further investigation by prosecutors and Congress. But the Guantanamo commander was not acting on his own: The interrogation of Mr. Qahtani, investigators found, was carried out under rules approved by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002. After strong protests from military lawyers, the Rumsfeld standards -- which explicitly allowed nudity, the use of dogs and shackling -- were revised in April 2003. Yet the same practices were later adopted at Abu Ghraib, at least in part at the direct instigation of Gen. Miller. "We understood," Maj. DiNenna testified, "that [Gen. Miller] was sent over by the secretary of defense."
The White House and Pentagon have gotten away with their stonewalling largely because of Republican control of Congress. When the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted, GOP leaders such as Sen. John W. Warner (Va.) loudly vowed to get to the bottom of the matter -- but once the bottom started to come into view late last year, Mr. Warner's demands for accountability ceased. Mr. Rumsfeld and other senior officials have never been the subject of an independent investigation. A recommendation by the latest Army probe that Gen. Miller be reprimanded for his role in the Qahtani interrogation was rejected by Gen. Bantz Craddock of Southern Command.
Bush won't pull US Troops out of Iraq
... the whole point of this war, it seems, was to establish a long-term military presence in Iraq to ensure American domination of the Middle East and its precious oil reserves, which have been described, the author Daniel Yergin tells us, as "the greatest single prize in all history."
You can run through all the wildly varying rationales for this war: the weapons of mass destruction (that were never found), the need to remove the unmitigated evil of Saddam (whom we had once cozied up to), the connection to Al Qaeda (which was bogus), and one of President Bush's favorites, the need to fight the terrorists "over there" so we won't have to fight them here at home.
All the rationales have to genuflect before "The Prize," which was the title of Mr. Yergin's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book. It's the oil, stupid.
What has so often gotten lost in all the talk about terror and weapons of mass destruction is the fact that for so many of the most influential members of the Bush administration, the obsessive desire to invade Iraq preceded the Sept. 11 attacks. It preceded the Bush administration. The neoconservatives were beating the war drums on Iraq as far back as the late 1990's.
Iraq was supposed to be a first step. Iran was also in the neoconservatives' sights. The neocons envisaged U.S. control of the region (and its oil), to be followed inevitably by the realization of their ultimate dream, a global American empire. Of course it sounds like madness, which is why we should have been paying closer attention from the beginning.
The madness took a Dr. Strangelovian turn in the summer of 2002, before the war with Iraq was launched. As The Washington Post first reported, an influential Pentagon advisory board was given a briefing prepared by a Rand Corporation analyst who said the U.S. should consider seizing the oil fields and financial assets of Saudi Arabia if it did not stop its support of terrorism.
Mercifully the briefing went nowhere. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said it did not represent the "dominant opinion" within the administration.
The point here is that the invasion of Iraq was part of a much larger, long-term policy that had to do with the U.S. imposing its will, militarily when necessary, throughout the Middle East and beyond. The war has gone badly, and the viciousness of the Iraq insurgency has put the torch to the idea of further pre-emptive adventures by the Bush administration.
But dreams of empire die hard. American G.I.'s are dug into Iraq, and the bases have been built for a long stay. The war may be going badly, but the primary consideration is that there is still a tremendous amount of oil at stake, the second-largest reserves on the planet. And neocon fantasies aside, the global competition for the planet's finite oil reserves intensifies by the hour.
Lyndon Johnson ignored the unsolicited advice of Senator George Aiken of Vermont - to declare victory in Vietnam in 1966. The war continued for nearly a decade. Many high-level government figures believe that U.S. troops will be in Iraq for a minimum of 5 more years, and perhaps 10.
That should be understood by the people who think that the formation of a permanent Iraqi government will lead to the withdrawal of American troops. There is no real withdrawal plan. The fighting and the dying will continue indefinitely.
MI5 Analysts Admit Link between Iraq War and Bombings
Iraq has become “a dominant issue” for Islamic extremists in Britain, MI5 has admitted.
In a fresh analysis of the threat facing Britain from international terrorist groups, the acknowledgement underlines the view of the security and intelligence services that Iraq has provided an extra motivating force for terrorists. Contributing to the agency’s official website after the July 7 bombings, under the heading “Threat to the UK from international terrorism”, a team of MI5 analysts concludes: “Though they have a range of aspirations and ‘causes’, Iraq is a dominant issue for a range of extremist groups and individuals in the UK and Europe.”
After the suicide bombings in London, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, said there was no connection between them and the war in Iraq. This conflicted with a leaked assessment by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre, based at MI5 and run by a Ministry of Defence official, which claimed, three weeks before July 7 that Iraq was continuing to act “as a focus of a range of terrorist related activities in Britain”.
The latest MI5 assessment sticks to the view that there is a link between Iraq and terrorist activities. In their website analysis, the MI5 officers add: “Some individuals who support the insurgency are known to have travelled to Iraq in order to fight against coalition forces. It is possible that they may return to the UK and consider mounting attacks here.”
Iraq Wants Quick Withdrawal of U.S. Troops
Iraq's transitional prime minister called Wednesday for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops and the top U.S. commander here said he believed a "fairly substantial" pullout could begin next spring and summer.
Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari said at a joint news conference with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the time has arrived to plan a coordinated transition from American to Iraqi military control throughout the country.
Asked how soon a U.S. withdrawal should happen, he said no exact timetable had been set. "But we confirm and we desire speed in that regard," he said, speaking through a translator. "And this fast pace has two aspects."
Use of Dogs at Abu Ghraib approved by Defence Dept. says warden
A former warden of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq testified today that he attended a meeting in which the then-commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison recommended using military dogs for interrogation.
Maj. David Dinenna testified at the end of a preliminary hearing for two Army dog handlers accused of abusing Iraqi detainees. Dinenna said at a September 2003 meeting, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, the Guantanamo Bay commander, talked about the effectiveness of using the dogs.
"We understood that he was sent over by the secretary of defense," Dinenna testified.
He said teams of trainers were sent to Abu Ghraib "to take these interrogation techniques, other techniques they learned at Guantanamo Bay and try to incorporate them in Iraq."
The statements bolstered defence claims that the use of dogs to terrify inmates were sanctioned high up the chain of command and were not the actions of a few rogue soldiers, as the government claims.
Iraq: Civil War Specter Spurs New US Exit Plans
”From the moment American troops crossed the border 28 months ago,” Burns wrote, ”the
specter hanging over the American enterprise here has been that Iraq, freedom (Saddam) Hussein's tyranny, might prove to be so fractured...that would spiral inexorably into civil war.”
...the insurgency appears to be ”growing more violent, more resilient and more sophisticated than ever...
American senior military officer, Baghdad
”Now, events are pointing more than ever to the possibility that the nightmare could come true,” according to Burns, who noted that Shiite militias and Shiite and Kurdish-led army and police units were themselves taking increasingly aggressive counter-measures, including abducting, torturing, and executing suspected insurgents and their perceived sympathizers and defenders.
The second story, by two other Baghdad-based Times correspondents, quoted unnamed senior military officers reiterating two big frustrations that have been heard since July, 2003: that the insurgency appears to be ”growing more violent, more resilient and more sophisticated than ever,” and that prosecuting the war is like sowing dragons' teeth.
”We are capturing or killing a lot of insurgents,” one ”senior (U.S.) Army intelligence officer,” told the Times. ”But they're being replaced quicker than we can interdict their operations. There is always another insurgent ready to step up and take charge.”
Such assessments are spurring what rapidly has become a cottage industry -- particularly from the Democratic side of the political spectrum -- one fueled in part by the leak in early July of a British contingency plan that called for halving the number of U.S. and British troops in Iraq by the latter part of 2006.
Shots to the Heart of Iraq
Innocent civilians, including people who are considered vital to building democracy, are increasingly being killed by U.S. troops
... "I understand American soldiers are nervous. It's very dangerous," said Othman, who was a member of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council that helped run Iraq after the invasion. "But the killings are undermining support for the U.S. government. It has helped people who call themselves the opposition. It has helped terrorism."
A recent case highlighted by the Iraqi government in its criticism of the U.S. was the June 24 killing of Yasser Salihee, 30, an Iraqi special correspondent for Knight-Ridder newspapers. Salihee, a physician, had taken a rare day off and planned to take his wife and daughter swimming. He went to get gasoline and was returning home at midmorning. By then, U.S. troops were conducting a military operation in his neighborhood. It appears he did not see them until it was too late.
<>The route he chose was not blocked off and there was no sign warning motorists to halt, witnesses say. As he neared the scene of the military operation, a U.S. Army sniper fired at his car. One bullet hit a tire. The other hit Salihee in the forehead. That bullet also severed fingers on his right hand, indicating he was holding up at least one of his hands at the time he was killed. U.S. officials are investigating the shooting.
Salihee's widow, Raghad al Wazzan, said she accepted the American soldiers' presence when they first arrived in Iraq because "they came and liberated us." She sometimes helped them at the hospital where she works as a doctor. But not anymore.
"Now, after they killed my husband, I hate them," she said. "I want to blow them all up."
Making up reasons for war
The nuclear threat was the only justification for the urgency of war, and not only was it baseless but because of what he wrote, it was now clear that the architects of the war knew it was baseless.
Here is the motivation for the outing of Ms. Plame, a CIA agent. It appears that the White House was not intent so much on punishing Mr. Wilson as on discrediting him, by suggesting that his trip had been some sort of junket arranged by his wife. Mr. Wilson's revelation, if true, exposed the dishonesty at the core of the administration's maneuverings over Iraq. And of course it was true.
Why Generals Won't Ask for More Troops
Rumsfeld and his civilian inner circle kept singing the same tune: Anything the commanders over there ask for they will get. As the younger generation likes to say: Yeah, right. If they ask for more troops, they will get the ax.
Ask Army Lt. Gen. John Riggs. In September 2004 while Rumsfeld and Army chief Gen. Peter Schoomaker were doing their best to keep Congress from adding more troops to the Army, Riggs was quoted in a newspaper article (Baltimore Sun, Sept. 13, 2004) that even 10,000 more soldiers would not be enough.
''You probably are looking at substantially more than 10,000,'' Riggs told the paper. ``I have been in the Army 39 years and I've never seen the Army as stretched in that 39 years as I have today.''
Riggs had already requested retirement. It usually takes 60 days for the paperwork to get done. Two days before that period ended Riggs was told that he was being demoted to two-star rank and would retire at that rank and pay. Riggs has appealed.
Meanwhile the Pentagon leadership continues to respond to all questions about the troop strength in Iraq by singing the old song: Anything the military commanders over there ask for they will get.
That is the answer even though those same commanders don't have enough troops to permanently base any of them along the wide-open Syrian border crossings where hundreds of foreign Jihad terrorists have crossed into Iraq on their way to become suicide bombers killing Americans and Iraqis alike.
That is the answer even though those same commanders have never had enough troops to secure the hundreds of old ammunition dumps scattered all over Iraq, which contain more than a million tons of bombs, artillery shells, bullets, rockets and launchers.
Iraq: This is Now an Unwinnable Conflict
The war in Iraq is now joining the Boer War in 1899 and the Suez crisis in 1956 as ill-considered ventures that have done Britain more harm than good. It has demonstrably strengthened al-Qa'ida by providing it with a large pool of activists and sympathizers across the Muslim world it did not possess before the invasion of 2003. The war, which started out as a demonstration of US strength as the world's only superpower, has turned into a demonstration of weakness. Its 135,000-strong army does not control much of Iraq.
The suicide bombing campaign in Iraq is unique. Never before have so many fanatical young Muslims been willing to kill themselves, trying to destroy those whom they see as their enemies. On a single day in Baghdad this month 12 bombers blew themselves up. There have been more than 500 suicide attacks in Iraq over the last year.
It is this campaign which has now spread to Britain and Egypt. The Iraq war has radicalized a significant part of the Muslim world. Most of the bombers in Iraq are non-Iraqi, but the network of sympathizers and supporters who provide safe houses, money, explosives, detonators, vehicles and intelligence is home-grown.
The shrill denials by Tony Blair and Jack Straw that hostility to the invasion of Iraq motivated the bombers are demonstrably untrue. The findings of an investigation, to be published soon, into 300 young Saudis, caught and interrogated by Saudi intelligence on their way to Iraq to fight or blow themselves up, shows that very few had any previous contact with al-Qa'ida or any other terrorist organization previous to 2003. It was the invasion of Iraq which prompted their decision to die.
Some 36 Saudis who did blow themselves up in Iraq did so for similar reasons, according to the same study, commissioned by the Saudi government and carried out by a US-trained Saudi researcher, Nawaf Obaid, who was given permission to speak to Saudi intelligence officers. A separate Israeli study of 154 foreign fighters in Iraq, carried out by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Israel, also concluded that almost all had been radicalized by Iraq alone.
Before Iraq, those who undertook suicide bombings were a small, hunted group; since the invasion they have become a potent force, their ideology and tactics adopted by militant Islamic groups around the world. Their numbers may still not be very large but they are numerous enough to create mayhem in Iraq and anywhere else they strike, be it in London or Sharm el Sheikh.
The bombers have paralyzed Baghdad. I have spent half my time living in Iraq since the invasion. The country has never been so dangerous as today. Some targets have been hit again and again. The army recruiting center at al-Muthana old municipal airport in the middle of Baghdad has been attacked no fewer than eight times, the last occasion on Wednesday when eight people were killed.
Cheney Opposes Detainee Legislation
The Bush administration in recent days has been lobbying to block legislation supported by Republican senators that would bar the U.S. military from engaging in "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of detainees, from hiding prisoners from the Red Cross, and from using interrogation methods not authorized by a new Army field manual.
Vice President Cheney met Thursday evening with three senior Republican members of the Senate Armed Services Committee to press the administration's case that legislation on these matters would usurp the president's authority and -- in the words of a White House official -- interfere with his ability "to protect Americans effectively from terrorist attack."
It was the second time that Cheney has met with Senate members to tamp down what the White House views as an incipient Republican rebellion. The lawmakers have publicly expressed frustration about what they consider to be the administration's failure to hold any senior military officials responsible for notorious detainee abuse in Iraq and the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
25,000 Civilians Killed Since Iraq Invasion, Says Report
The number of Iraqi civilians who met violent deaths in the two years after the US-led invasion was today put at 24,865 by an independent research team.
The figures, compiled from Iraqi and international media reports, found US and coalition military forces were responsible for 37% of the deaths, with anti-occupation forces and insurgents responsible for 9%. A further 36% were blamed on criminal violence.
Civilian deaths attributed to US and coalition military forces peaked in the invasion period from March to May 2003 - which accounts for 30% of all civilian deaths in the two-year period - but the longer-term trend has been for increasing numbers to die at the hands of insurgents.
Figures obtained last week from the Iraqi interior ministry put the average civilian and police officer death toll in insurgent attacks from August 2004 to March 2005 at 800 a month.
John Sloboda of the Iraq Body Count project, which co-authored the report with Oxford Research Group, said the Iraqi civilian death toll was the "forgotten cost" of the decision to go to war in Iraq.
"On average, 34 Iraqis every day have met violent deaths since the invasion of March 2003," he said at the launch of the report in London.
... A report published last year in the medical journal the Lancet suggested the chances of a violent death in Iraq were 58 times higher after the invasion than before it.
Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University in the US and the Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad put the civilian death toll at up to 100,000 since the invasion.
Two-Thirds Believe London Bombings are Linked to Iraq War
Two-thirds of Britons believe there is a link between Tony Blair's decision to invade Iraq and the London bombings despite government claims to the contrary, according to a Guardian/ICM poll published today.
The poll makes it clear that voters believe further attacks in Britain by suicide bombers are also inevitable, with 75% of those responding saying there will be more attacks.
The research suggests the government is losing the battle to persuade people that terrorist attacks on the UK have not been made more likely by the invasion of Iraq.
According to the poll, 33% of Britons think the prime minister bears "a lot" of responsibility for the London bombings and a further 31% "a little".
The Real Cost of U.S. War Policy
... The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost American taxpayers more than $314 billion so far and the Bush's administration's open- ended commitment has rightly raised concerns, even among war supporters.
At the rate the United States is spending to fund the war efforts, the military campaigns could become the most expensive operations in the past 60 years, far exceeding the costs of the Korean and Vietnam wars. One nonpartisan Washington think tank estimates that the cost of the war in Iraq could exceed $700 billion -- a remarkable sum considering that polls show a majority of American believe that the war wasn't worth starting and feel that they are no safer today than they were before Sept. 11, 2001.
Such mind-numbing spending on wars with no discernible exit strategy is all the more troublesome because it has occurred outside the normal budget process, with a series of pay-as-you-go supplemental appropriations. The stealth-funding approach has come without comparable reductions in other government programs, thus saddling the country with an enormous debt burden that exceeded more than $400 billion last year.
Link to Cheney Deepens ‘Leak-Gate’ Scandal
Libby’s involvement represents an even more insidious abuse of power. The Bush administration is being accused of leaking the name of Valerie Plame in retribution for a New York Times op-ed article written by her husband, diplomat Joseph Wilson. Wilson wrote that he never found any evidence in a 2002 trip to Africa, contrary to claims made by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address, that Saddam Hussein was procuring uranium from Niger for nuclear weapons.
Bush would invade Iraq over weapons of mass destruction that were never found. But Libby, Cheney, and the other influential right-wing hard-liners, such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith, saw their dreams come true. Back in the administration of the senior President Bush, Cheney was defense secretary and Libby and Wolfowitz were two of his aides who, after the first Gulf War left Saddam in power, drafted a document advocating ‘‘preemptive’’ war against possible threats.
They said the United States should be ‘‘postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated.’’
...Libby was in the thick of whipping up fear over the thinnest of evidence. The level to which Libby and Cheney stooped to get their war was highlighted by the momentous presentation of Saddam’s ‘‘threat’’ before the United Nations Security Council by then Secretary of State Colin Powell.
... Powell, according to both US News and Vanity Fair, was so irritated by Libby’s hodgepodge of unsubstantiated facts that he threw documents into the air and said, ‘‘I’m not reading this. This is bull ...’’
Libby, whose nickname is Scooter, was particularly unhappy that Powell had thrown out sections of the presentation that would have attempted to link Al Qaeda to Saddam, including a discredited report that top 9/11 Al Qaeda airline hijacker Mohamed Atta had a meeting with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. According to Vanity Fair, ‘‘Cheney’s office made one last ditch effort to persuade Powell to link Saddam and Al Qaeda and to slip the Prague story back into the speech. Only moments before Powell began speaking, Scooter Libby tried unsuccessfully to reach [Larry] Wilkerson by phone. Powell’s staff chief, by then inside the Security Council chamber, declined to take the call. ‘Scooter,’ said one State Department aide, ‘wasn’t happy.’’’
According to Vanity Fair, Cheney himself urged Powell to go ahead and stake his national popularity on the nonexistent evidence by saying to Powell, ‘‘Your poll numbers are in the 70s. You can afford to lose a few points.’’
America and Iraq would go on to lose more than a few points. Libby may end up as a symbol of a government so driven to ignore the truth it was willing to resort to dirty tricks to stop anyone from telling it.
"Figures on unemployment are giving a false signal"
"We have four of five indicators telling us that the state of the job market is not that good and only one - the unemployment rate - reading green."
In particular, even the most favorable measures show that employment growth has lagged well behind population growth over the past four years. Yet the measured unemployment rate isn't much higher than it was in early 2001. How is that possible?
The answer, according to the survey used to estimate the unemployment rate, is a decline in labor force participation. Nonworking Americans aren't considered unemployed unless they are actively looking for work, and hence counted as part of the labor force. And a large number of people have, for some reason, dropped out of the official labor force.
Those with a downbeat view of the jobs picture argue that the low reported unemployment rate is a statistical illusion, that there are millions of Americans who would be looking for jobs if more jobs were available. Those with an upbeat view argue that labor force participation has fallen for reasons that have nothing to do with job availability - for example, young adults, recognizing the importance of education, may have chosen to stay in school longer.
That's where Dr. Bradbury's study comes in. She shows that the upbeat view doesn't hold up in the face of a careful examination of the numbers. In fact, because older Americans, especially older women, are more likely to work than in the past, labor force participation should have risen, not fallen, over the past four years. As a result, she suggests that there may be "considerable slack in the U.S. labor market": there are at least 1.6 million and possibly as many as 5.1 million people who aren't counted as unemployed but would take jobs if they were available.
There's both good news and bad news in that assessment. The good news is that the economy probably has plenty of room to expand before inflation becomes a problem (which implies that the Fed's decision to start raising interest rates was premature).
The bad news is that it's hard to see where further expansion will come from. We've already had four years of extremely loose fiscal and monetary policy. Tax cuts have pushed the federal budget deep into the red. Low interest rates have helped generate a housing bubble that has lifted real estate prices to ludicrous heights in major parts of the country.
If all that wasn't enough to give us a full economic recovery, what will?
Report of Covert Aid to Iraqi Candidates
In the months before the Iraqi elections in January, President Bush approved a plan to provide covert support to certain Iraqi candidates and political parties but rescinded the proposal because of congressional opposition, current and former government officials said Saturday.
In a statement issued in response to questions about a report in the next issue of the New Yorker magazine, Frederick Jones, the spokesman for the National Security Council, said that "in the final analysis, the president determined and the United States government adopted a policy that we would not try -- and did not try -- to influence the outcome of the Iraqi election by covertly helping individual candidates for office."
The New Yorker article, by Seymour M. Hersh, reports that the administration proceeded with the covert plan over the congressional objections.
Several senior Bush administration officials disputed that, although they recalled renewed discussions within the administration last fall about how the United States might counter what was seen as extensive Iranian support to pro- Iranian Shiite parties.
Any clandestine U.S. effort to influence the Iraqi elections, or to provide particular support to candidates or parties seen as amenable to working with the United States, would have run counter to Bush's assertions that the vote would be free and unfettered.
The article cites unidentified former military and intelligence officials who said the administration had gone ahead with covert election activities in Iraq that "were conducted by retired CIA officers and other nongovernment personnel, and used funds that were not necessarily appropriated by Congress." But it does not provide details and says "the methods and the scope of the covert effort have been hard to discern."
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Rancho Palos Verdes (Los Angeles County), the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, issued a statement saying that she could not discuss classified information, adding, "Congress was consulted about the administration's posture in the Iraqi election. I was personally consulted. But if the administration did what is alleged, that would be a violation of the covert action requirements, and that would be deeply troubling."
Rove was first source on CIA agent - Time reporter
"So did Rove leak Plame's name to me, or tell me she was covert? No. Was it through my conversation with Rove that I learned for the first time that Wilson's wife worked at the CIA and may have been responsible for sending him? Yes. Did Rove say that she worked at the 'agency' on 'WMD'? Yes," Cooper wrote in Time's current edition.
"When he said things would be declassified soon, was that itself impermissible? I don't know. Is any of this a crime? Beats me," Cooper wrote.
12 suicide bombings on one day in Iraq
A suicide bomber killed at least 60 people and wounded 85 in a massive fireball when he blew himself up next to a liquefied gas tanker outside a Shiite mosque south of Baghdad, an interior ministry official said.
The powerful blast caused a firestorm which completely destroyed two nearby residential buildings, along with a number of shops, and a crowded cafe in the town of Al-Musayyib, 60 kilometres (37 miles) south of the capital, he added.
The attack capped two days of frenzied suicide bombings around the country which left at least 40 more people dead and injured 160 others, according to security officials.
Most other attacks took place in Baghdad.
Friday's attacks involved 12 suicide bombings, the largest number in a single day since April 29, the day after Ibrahim Jaafari became prime minister.
It Appears That Karl Rove Is In Serious Trouble
... Karl Rove may be able to claim that he did not know he was leaking "classified information" about a "covert agent," but there can be no question he understood that what he was leaking was "sensitive information." The very fact that Matt Cooper called it "double super secret background" information suggests Rove knew of its sensitivity, if he did not know it was classified information (which by definition is sensitive).
United States District Court Judge Richard Story's statement to Jonathan Randel, at the time of sentencing, might have an unpleasant ring for Karl Rove. Judge Story told Randel that he surely must have appreciated the risks in leaking DEA information. "Anything that would affect the security of officers and of the operations of the agency would be of tremendous concern, I think, to any law-abiding citizen in this country," the judge observed. Judge Story concluded this leak of sensitive information was "a very serious crime."
"In my view," he explained, "it is a very serious offense because of the risk that comes with it, and part of that risk is because of the position" that Randel held in DEA. But the risk posed by the information Rove leaked is multiplied many times over; it occurred at a time when the nation was considering going to war over weapons of mass destruction. And Rove was risking the identity of, in attempting to discredit, a WMD proliferation expert, Valerie Plame Wilson.
... While there are other potential violations of the law that may be involved with the Valerie Plame Wilson case, it would be speculation to consider them. But Karl Rove's leak to Matt Cooper is now an established fact. First, there is Matt Cooper's email record. And Cooper has now confirmed that he has told the grand jury he spoke with Rove. If Rove's leak fails to fall under the statute that was used to prosecute Randel, I do not understand why.
Karl Rove's America
... Rove understood that the facts were irrelevant. For one thing, he knew he could count on the administration's supporters to obediently accept a changing story line. Read the before-and-after columns by pro-administration pundits about Iraq: before the war they castigated the C.I.A. for understating the threat posed by Saddam's W.M.D.; after the war they castigated the C.I.A. for exaggerating the very same threat.
Mr. Rove also understands, better than anyone else in American politics, the power of smear tactics. Attacks on someone who contradicts the official line don't have to be true, or even plausible, to undermine that person's effectiveness. All they have to do is get a lot of media play, and they'll create the sense that there must be something wrong with the guy.
And now we know just how far he was willing to go with these smear tactics: as part of the effort to discredit Joseph Wilson IV, Mr. Rove leaked the fact that Mr. Wilson's wife worked for the C.I.A. I don't know whether Mr. Rove can be convicted of a crime, but there's no question that he damaged national security for partisan advantage. If a Democrat had done that, Republicans would call it treason. But what we're getting, instead, is yet another impressive demonstration that these days, truth is political. One after another, prominent Republicans and conservative pundits have declared their allegiance to the party line. They haven't just gone along with the diversionary tactics, like the irrelevant questions about whether Mr. Rove used Valerie Wilson's name in identifying her (Robert Novak later identified her by her maiden name, Valerie Plame), or the false, easily refuted claim that Mr. Wilson lied about who sent him to Niger. They're now a chorus, praising Mr. Rove as a patriotic whistle-blower.
Ultimately, this isn't just about Mr. Rove. It's also about Mr. Bush, who has always known that his trusted political adviser - a disciple of the late Lee Atwater, whose smear tactics helped President Bush's father win the 1988 election - is a thug, and obviously made no attempt to find out if he was the leaker.
Most of all, it's about what has happened to America. How did our political system get to this point?
Rove Leak Shows Administration's "Depravity"
... what Rove's leak and Novak's column really exposed was the depravity of the administration's deliberate use of a false WMD threat and its willingness to go after anyone willing to tell the truth about it.
It's ironic that the expertise of this couple should be turned against them by a White House that has demonstrated nothing but incompetence in dealing with the WMD issue. But clearly truth and competence are virtues easily shed by the Bush administration in the pursuit of political advantage, even when this partisan game jeopardizes national security.
This is the most important issue raised by the Plame scandal. It has been unfortunately obscured by the secondary debate in the case: whether reporters should ever reveal their sources. Yet what the emerging Rove scandal demonstrates is the ease with which a wily top White House official can subvert the Bill of Rights' protection of the free press to serve the tawdriest of political ends.
Drop in Bush's Personal Credibility
The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed the percentage of Americans who believe Bush is "honest and straightforward" fell to 41 percent from 50 percent in January, while those who say they doubt his veracity climbed to 45 percent from 36 percent.
Guantánamo abuse 'allowable'
Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay degraded and abused a key prisoner, forcing him to wear a bra and threatening him with a dog, military investigators claimed yesterday.
But in a military report pre sented before the Senate armed services committee, the investigators said the treatment of the Saudi man, described as the "20th hijacker" in the September 11 attacks, did not amount to torture.
The man was not named during the hearing, but the Pentagon identified him as Mohamed al-Qahtani. The Senate panel heard that he was forced to wear a leash and subjected to investigations for up to 20 hours a day.
Karl Rove was deliberately outing Ms Plame
Mr Rove has denied being the original leaker of Ms Plame's name to the columnist Robert Novak. That was "literally" true, said the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "but he appears to have done the next best thing.
"The exposure of Ms Plame, in effect ending her career at the CIA, was believed to be political payback for the criticisms her husband, the former US diplomat Joseph Wilson, made of the White House's Iraq policy. In an email to a Time journalist in 2003, Mr Rove spoke of "Wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on WMD". "Learning the name of a former ambassador's wife would be easy as falling off a log," said the Journal Sentinel.
"Whether or not he used her name, Mr Rove was deliberately outing Ms Plame," said Robert Kuttner in the Boston Globe. "If he played the same word games before the grand jury, he's in trouble."
Mr Rove may not have acted illegally, said the Houston Chronicle's Cragg Hines, but in "guiding a reporter to her ... [he] violated the spirit that supposedly governs the current administration".
The White House had revealed Ms Plame's identity for political reasons, said the New York Times. By promising to sack the official who did so, and by asserting it was not Mr Rove, it had "painted itself into a corner".
When Mr Bush said he would take "appropriate action", he did not mean "promoting the culprit to deputy chief of staff, Mr Rove's title", said the Washington Post's Harold Meyerson: "Or did he? There's no basis to conclude that if Mr Rove was the guy who outed Ms Plame, he told his boss about it. But Mr Rove was, and has always been, Mr Bush's one indispensable aide precisely, though not only, because he would do whatever it took to advance his boss's interests."
Instead of denying climate change is happening, the US now denies that we need proper regulation to stop it
Last month the New York Times revealed that Philip Cooney, a lawyer with no scientific training, had been imported into the White House from the American Petroleum Institute, to control the presentation of climate science. He edited scientific reports, striking out evidence of glacier retreat and inserting phrases suggesting that there was serious scientific doubt about climate change. Working with the Exxon-sponsored PR man Myron Ebell, he lobbied successfully to get rid of the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who had refused to accept the official line.
Cooney's work was augmented by Harlan Watson, the US government's chief climate negotiator, who insisted that the findings of the National Academy of Sciences be excised from official reports. Now Joe Barton, the Republican chairman of the House committee on energy and commerce, has launched a congressional investigation of three US scientists whose work reveals the historical pattern of climate change. He has demanded that they hand over their records and reveal their sources of funding.
Perhaps most pertinently, the official policy of climate-change denial, like Lysenkoism, relies on a compliant press. Just as Pravda championed the disavowal of genetics, so the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Times, the Daily Mail and the Daily and Sunday Telegraphs champion the Bush team's denial of climate science. Like Pravda, they dismiss it without showing any sign that they have read or understood it.
But climate change denial, like Lysenkoism, cannot last forever. Now, as the G8 communique shows, the White House is beginning to move on. Instead of denying that climate change is happening, it is denying that anything difficult needs to be done to prevent it. The other G8 leaders have gone along with this.
Faced with the greatest crisis humanity has ever encountered, the most powerful men in the world have meekly resolved to "promote" better practice and to "encourage" companies to do better. The R-word is half-mentioned twice: they will "improve regulatory ... frameworks". This could mean anything: most of the G8 governments define better regulation as less regulation. Nowhere is there a clear statement that they will force anyone to do anything to stop destroying the conditions which sustain human life.
White House Silence on Rove's Role in C.I.A. Leak
Nearly two years after stating that any administration official found to have been involved in leaking the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer would be fired, and assuring that Karl Rove and other senior aides to President Bush had nothing to do with the disclosure, the White House refused on Monday to answer any questions about new evidence of Mr. Rove's role in the matter.
With the White House silent, Democrats rushed in, demanding that the administration provide a full account of any involvement by Mr. Rove, one of the president's closest advisers, turning up the political heat in the case and leaving some Republicans worried about the possible effects on Mr. Bush's second-term agenda.
... In September 2003, Mr. McClellan said flatly that Mr. Rove had not been involved in disclosing Ms. Plame's name. Asked about the issue on Sept. 29, 2003, Mr. McClellan said he had "spoken with Karl Rove," and that it was "simply not true" that Mr. Rove had a role in the disclosure of her identity. Two weeks earlier, he had called suggestions that Mr. Rove had been involved "totally ridiculous." On Oct. 10, 2003, after the Justice Department opened its investigation, Mr. McClellan told reporters that Mr. Rove, Mr. Abrams and Mr. Libby had nothing to do with the leak.
Mr. McClellan and Mr. Bush have both made clear that leaking Ms. Plame's identity would be considered a firing offense by the White House. Mr. Bush was asked about that position most recently a little over a year ago, when he was asked whether he stood by his pledge to fire anyone found to have leaked the officer's name. "Yes," he replied, on June 10, 2004.
Under some circumstances, it can be against the law to disclose the identity of a covert C.I.A. operative. Mr. Luskin has said he has been told by the prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, that Mr. Rove is not a target of the investigation.
A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War
Your son is an infantry officer, shipping out soon for Iraq. How do you feel about that?
Blair's Alliance with Bush Bombed
If we are fighting insurgency in Iraq what makes us believe insurgency won't come to us? One thing is certain: If Blair really believes that by "fighting terrorism"' in Iraq we could more efficiently protect Britain, this argument is no longer valid.
... To go on pretending that Britain's enemies want to destroy "what we hold dear" encourages racism; what we are confronting here is a specific, direct, centralized attack on London as a result of a "war on terror" that Blair has locked us into. Just before the U.S. presidential elections, bin Laden asked: "Why do we not attack Sweden?" Lucky Sweden. No Osama bin Laden there. And no Tony Blair.
Senator Boxer Sums Up The Iraq War
... On September 12, the same day that I spoke on the Senate floor, the top terrorism expert at the White House, Richard Clarke, sat down with the president and a few colleagues in the Situation Room. He describes this scene in his book. I quote:
“`Look,’ [the President] told us, `I know you have a lot to do and all…but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way.’
“I was once again taken back, incredulous, and it showed,’ Clarke wrote. ‘But, Mr. President, al Qaeda did this.’
`I know, I know, but…see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.’
`Absolutely, we will look…again.’ I was trying to be more respectful, more responsive. `But, you know, we have looked several times for state sponsorship of al Qaeda and not found any real linkages to Iraq. Iran plays a little, as does Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, Yemen.’
`Look into Iraq, Saddam,’ the President said testily and left us.”
No link was found. And yet, according to Bob Woodward, two months later, the President took Rumsfeld aside and asked, “What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.”
Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill says that going after Saddam was raised at a meeting just 10 days after the first inauguration.
And then there’s the now-famous Downing Street memo. In July, 2002, months before Bush asked Congress for authority to wage war in Iraq, the head of British intelligence reported that, and I quote: “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and [Weapons of Mass Destruction]. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
So, what happened to the President’s aides who misled the public about the connection between 9/11 and Iraq, those who falsely claimed that this war was about terrorism, and that it wouldn’t cost us much—in lives, troops, or dollars?
Condi Rice, who said “We do know that there have been shipments going…into…Iraq…of aluminum tubes that…are really only suited for nuclear weapons programs,” was promoted to be our Secretary of State.
Paul Wolfowitz, who said, “Like the people in France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator,” got the top job at the World Bank.
George Tenet, who called the WMD claims a “slam dunk” was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
And the President? He had to know al Qaeda was not in Iraq before the war. [SHOW CHART]. His own State Department issued a report right after 9/11. It lists 45 countries in which al Qaeda operated. Guess who was not on that list? Iraq.
Now, there were some who tried to speak the truth. But they didn’t last long in the Bush Administration.
Richard Clarke and Paul O’Neill are both gone.
Army Vice Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki estimated that it could take “several hundred thousand” soldiers to successfully stabilize Iraq, Wolfowitz called that number “wildly off the mark.” Shinseki retired early.
White House economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey said that a U.S. intervention in Iraq could cost between $100 and $200 billion. He was disputed, and ultimately left. We’ve now surpassed $200 billion.
The rest of us were told we had no right to criticize the President in a time of war.
Twenty six months ago, President Bush told us our mission was accomplished. It wasn’t. And do you know why? The Administration knew how to win phase one—the military invasion—but had absolutely no plan to win phase two—the peace. As former NSC Advisor Brzezinski said, “This war has been conducted with “tactical and strategic incompetence.”
So, where we are now? We have already lost 1,746 Americans in Iraq, 13,190 have been wounded. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, up to 17 percent of Iraq veterans suffer from major depression, generalized anxiety or post traumatic stress disorder. Divorces for active duty and enlisted personnel has nearly doubled and 8,000 Iraqis have been killed.
Here is the unvarnished truth. The Bush Administration’s failures thus far have left us with no good choices. If you went to the doctor with a diseased kidney and he took out the wrong one, you would feel distressed, angry, and frustrated about your options.
... It is difficult to keep track of all the missions we’ve had so far in Iraq. There was the weapons of mass destruction mission. Then the regime change mission. Then the rebuilding mission. Then the democracy mission.
And finally, terrorism, which the president mentioned more than 30 times in his speech. “Our mission in Iraq is clear,” he said. “We will hunt down the terrorists.”
That mission is a guarantee of a never-ending cycle of violence because our open-ended presence in Iraq is itself fueling the recruitment of terrorists. With that as a mission, we will find ourselves on a treadmill that never stops. We stay there to hunt down the terrorists and more terrorists are recruited, so we fight them and more terrorists are recruited and so the cycle goes.
Let’s be clear: “What we have done in Iraq,” terrorism expert Peter Bergen explained, “is what bin Laden could not have hoped for in his wildest dreams…It’s hard to imagine a set of policies better designed to sabotage the war on terrorism.”
A report issued by the CIA’s think tank found that Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of “professionalized” terrorists. But, the tragic irony is, terrorism was the result of the war, not a reason for waging it and so we are in greater danger.
... military commanders consider that only about 5,000 Iraqi soldiers are capable of carrying out missions on their own. That’s especially troubling when you consider the size of the insurgency, which has been estimated at anything from 12,000 to 50,000 with many more supporters.
... We [in Congress, which is supposed to have oversight of wars fought by the US] have no idea—none—how long the Administration plans to be in Iraq. Is it two years, ten, twenty? Condi Rice now calls it“a generational commitment.” The President’s message of `as long as it takes’ is counterproductive.
Retired General Gregory Newbold, who was one of the central planners of phase one of the war, told us: “We have to understand that the fundamental reason for the insurgency, the thing that ties all the various groups together, is their view that we are an occupying power.”
... On December 11, Bob Woodward had just finished his second interview with President Bush. They stood by the glass doors looking out on the Rose Garden. And Woodward asked him, “Well, how is history likely to judge your Iraq war?”
“And he said, ‘History,’ and then he took his hands out of his pocket and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if to say this is a way off. And then he said, ‘History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”
Imagine if our forefathers fighting for independence had thought that way? Or those who fought in the Civil War? Or in the World Wars? Or those who risked their lives—like Martin Luther King Jr.—for civil rights? Or suffragists who almost died in a hunger strike for the right of women to vote.
Secret Plan To Quit Iraq
Britain And America are secretly preparing to withdraw most of their troops from Iraq - despite warnings of the grave consequences for the region, The Mail on Sunday has learned.
A secret paper written by Defence Secretary John Reid for Tony Blair reveals that many of the 8,500 British troops in Iraq are set to be brought home within three months, with most of the rest returning six months later.
The leaked document, marked Secret: UK Eyes Only, appears to fly in the face of Mr Blair and President Bush's pledges that Allied forces will not quit until Iraq's own forces are strong enough to take control of security.
If British troops pull out, other members of the Alliance are likely to follow. The memo says other international forces in Southern Iraq currently under British control will have to be handled carefully if Britain withdraws. It says they will not feel safe and may also leave.
Embarrassingly, the document says the Americans are split over the plan - and it suggests one of the reasons for getting British troops out is to save money. Mr Reid says cutting UK troop numbers to 3,000 by the middle of next year will save £500 million a year, though it will be 18 months before the cash comes through.
The document, Options For Future UK Force Posture In Iraq, is the first conclusive proof that preparations for a major withdrawal from Iraq are well advanced.
Rove outed Plame to Cooper, says Newsweek
... Cooper wrote that Rove offered him a "big warning" not to "get too far out on Wilson." Rove told Cooper that Wilson's trip had not been authorized by "DCIA"—CIA Director George Tenet—or Vice President Dick Cheney. Rather, "it was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd [weapons of mass destruction] issues who authorized the trip." Wilson's wife is Plame, then an undercover agent working as an analyst in the CIA's Directorate of Operations counterproliferation division. (Cooper later included the essence of what Rove told him in an online story.) The e-mail characterizing the conversation continues: "not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there's still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger ... "
Nothing in the Cooper e-mail suggests that Rove used Plame's name or knew she was a covert operative. Nonetheless, it is significant that Rove was speaking to Cooper before Novak's column appeared; in other words, before Plame's identity had been published. Fitzgerald has been looking for evidence that Rove spoke to other reporters as well. "Karl Rove has shared with Fitzgerald all the information he has about any potentially relevant contacts he has had with any reporters, including Matt Cooper," Luskin told NEWSWEEK.A source close to Rove, who declined to be identified because he did not wish to run afoul of the prosecutor or government investigators, added that there was "absolutely no inconsistency" between Cooper's e-mail and what Rove has testified to during his three grand-jury appearances in the case. "A fair reading of the e-mail makes clear that the information conveyed was not part of an organized effort to disclose Plame's identity, but was an effort to discourage Time from publishing things that turned out to be false,"
Why tolerance will win
nations dealing with acts of terrorism in the past have usually had to deal with known groups and known demands. There has usually been at least a political agenda with which to engage. What makes Islamic terrorism so problematic and menacing is that there are no representatives and no programme to deal with, only slogans of hate and death, exhorting violent resistance to 'Zionist-Crusader aggressors' who supposedly threaten to 'humiliate and subordinate the lands of Islam'.
Our only response, therefore, is to hold fast to the values that protect the lives and right to faith of all our citizens. Our leaders, national and local, have struck the right collective note. The Queen, after her visit to the Royal London Hospital, insisted that the right answer to the bombings was to resume our normal lives. The atrocities had reinforced 'our sense of community, our humanity, our trust in the rule of law', she said. Ken Livingstone caught the mood of most Londoners when he pledged that their desire to live and express themselves freely in a free city would triumph over the bigotry and authoritarianism of the bombers. The Prime Minister, in condemning the brutality of the perpetrators, spoke up for the mass of decent Islamic believers. Our leaders found the right words.
We should be grateful, too, for the words they did not use. None has spoken of retaliation or reprisals against other countries or sections of society. For it is crucial not to indulge in the rhetoric of a clash of civilisations, legitimising revenge attacks on Muslims and driving the many into feelings of marginalisation that will breed despair and strengthen the hand of hatemongers who find their recruits among the weak-minded.
Donation Brought Access to DeLay
A company indicted in a Texas campaign fundraising case says it was told that by giving a Tom DeLay political committee $25,000, company officials would get access to the U.S. House majority leader to influence legislation.
In court documents, Westar Energy of Kansas says that to meet with Mr. DeLay in 2002, company officials "were told they needed to write a check for $25,000" to Texans for a Republican Majority, known as TRMPAC.
It's the first time a company has said it donated to the Texas committee created by Mr. DeLay in exchange for a meeting and legislative help.
An aide to Mr. DeLay denied that he was swayed by the donation.
Revealed: grim world of new Iraqi torture camps
The video camera pans across Hassan an-Ni'ami's body as it is washed in the mosque for burial. In life he was a slender, good-looking man, usually dressed in a dark robe and white turban, Imam at a mosque in Baghdad's Adhimiya district and a senior official of the Muslim Clerics Association.
When I first interviewed him a year ago he was suspected of contacts with the insurgency. Certainly he supported resistance to US forces.
More recently, an-Ni'ami had dropped out of sight. Then, a little over a month ago, relatives say, paramilitary police commandos from 'Rapid Intrusion' found him at a family home in the Sha'ab neighbourhood of northern Baghdad. His capture was reported on television as that of a senior 'terrorist commander'. Twelve hours later his body turned up in the morgue.
What happened to him in his 24 hours in captivity was written across his body in chapters of pain, recorded by the camera. There are police-issue handcuffs still attached to one wrist, from which he was hanged long enough to cause his hands and wrists to swell. There are burn marks on his chest, as if someone has placed something very hot near his right nipple and moved it around.
A little lower are a series of horizontal welts, wrapping around his body and breaking the skin as they turn around his chest, as if he had been beaten with something flexible, perhaps a cable. There are other injuries: a broken nose and smaller wounds that look like cigarette burns.
An arm appears to have been broken and one of the higher vertebrae is pushed inwards. There is a cluster of small, neat circular wounds on both sides of his left knee. At some stage an-Ni'ami seems to have been efficiently knee-capped. It was not done with a gun - the exit wounds are identical in size to the entry wounds, which would not happen with a bullet. Instead it appears to have been done with something like a drill.
What actually killed him however were the bullets fired into his chest at close range, probably by someone standing over him as he lay on the ground. The last two hit him in the head.
The gruesome detail is important. Hanging by the arms in cuffs, scorching of the body with something like an iron and knee-capping are claimed to be increasingly prevalent in the new Iraq. Now evidence is emerging that appears to substantiate those claims. Not only Iraqis make the allegations. International officials describe the methods in disgusted but hushed tones, laying them at the door of the increasingly unaccountable forces attached to Iraq's Ministry of the Interior.
The only question that remains is the level of the co-ordination of the abuse: whether Iraq is stumbling towards a policy of institutionalised torture or whether these are incidents carried out by rogue elements.
... What is most shocking is that it is done under the noses of US and UK officials, some of whom admit that they are aware of the abuses being perpetrated by units who are diverting international funding to their dirty war.
Hassan an-Ni'ami may well have been a terrorist. Or he may have had knowledge of that terrorism. Or he may have been someone who objected too loudly to foreign troops being in Iraq. We will never know. He had no opportunity to defend himself, no lawyer, no trial. His interrogation and killing were a breach of international law.
Bush Ignores Facts, Loses Credibility
Both Mr. Bush's critics and loyalists at times misunderstand where his failure leaves America now. The left frets too much that the public just doesn't get it - that it is bamboozled by the administration and won't see the light until it digests the Downing Street memo. But even if they couldn't bring themselves to vote for John Kerry, most Americans do get it. A majority of the country view the Iraq war as "not worth it" and going badly. They intuitively sense that as USA Today calculated on Friday, there have been more U.S. military deaths (roughly a third more) in the year since Iraq got its sovereignty than in the year before. Last week an ABC News/Washington Post survey also found that a majority now believe that the administration "intentionally misled" us into a war - or, in the words of the Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration "fixed" the intelligence to gin up the mission.
Meanwhile, the war's die-hard supporters, now in the minority, keep clinging to the hope that some speech or Rovian stunt or happy political development in the furtherance of democratic Iraqi self-government can turn public opinion around. Dream on. The most illuminating of all the recent poll numbers was released by the Pew Research Center on June 13: the number of Americans who say that "people they know are becoming less involved emotionally" with news of the war has risen from 26 percent in May 2004 to 44 percent now. Like the war or not, Americans who do not have a relative or neighbor in the fight are simply tuning Iraq out.
The president has no one to blame but himself. The color-coded terror alerts, the repeated John Ashcroft press conferences announcing imminent Armageddon during election season, the endless exploitation of 9/11 have all taken their numbing toll. Fear itself is the emotional card Mr. Bush chose to overplay, and when he plays it now, he is the boy who cried wolf.
... If anything, we're back where we were in the lazy summer of 2001, when the president was busy in Crawford ignoring an intelligence report titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States" and the news media were more preoccupied with a rash of "Jaws"-like shark attacks than with Al Qaeda.
... AS those on all sides of the Iraq argument have said, the only way for Mr. Bush to break through this torpor is to tell Americans the truth. Donald Rumsfeld did exactly that when he said a week ago that the insurgency in Iraq might last as long as 12 years. If that's so, then what? Go ahead and argue that pulling out precipitously or setting a precise exit timetable is each a bad option, guaranteeing that Iraq will become even more of a jihad central than this ill-conceived war has already made it. But what is Plan C?
Mr. Bush could have addressed that question honestly on Tuesday night. Instead of once more cooking the books - exaggerating the number of coalition partners, the number of battle-ready Iraqi troops, the amount of non-American dollars in the Iraq kitty - he could have laid out the long haul in hard facts, explaining the future costs in manpower, money and time, and what sacrifices he proposes for meeting them. He could have been, as he is fond of calling himself, a leader.
... Iraq may not be Vietnam, but The Wall Street Journal reports that the current war's unpopularity now matches the Gallup findings during the Vietnam tipping point, the summer of 1968. As the prospect of midterm elections pumps more and more genuine fear into the hearts of Republicans up for re-election, it's the Bush presidency, not the insurgency, that will be in its last throes.
Iraq May Be Prime Place for Training of Militants, C.I.A. Report Concludes
WASHINGTON, June 21 - A new classified assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency says Iraq may prove to be an even more effective training ground for Islamic extremists than Afghanistan was in Al Qaeda's early days, because it is serving as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.
The assessment, completed last month and circulated among government agencies, was described in recent days by several Congressional and intelligence officials. The officials said it made clear that the war was likely to produce a dangerous legacy by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict.
Congressional and intelligence officials who described the assessment called it a thorough examination that included extensive discussion of the areas that might be particularly prone to infiltration by combatants from Iraq, either Iraqis or foreigners.
They said the assessment had argued that Iraq, since the American invasion of 2003, had in many ways assumed the role played by Afghanistan during the rise of Al Qaeda during the 1980's and 1990's, as a magnet and a proving ground for Islamic extremists from Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries.
The officials said the report spelled out how the urban nature of the war in Iraq was helping combatants learn how to carry out assassinations, kidnappings, car bombings and other kinds of attacks that were never a staple of the fighting in Afghanistan during the anti-Soviet campaigns of the 1980's. It was during that conflict, primarily rural and conventional, that the United States provided arms to Osama bin Laden and other militants, who later formed Al Qaeda.
The assessment said the central role played by Iraq meant that, for now, most potential terrorists were likely to focus their energies on attacking American forces there, rather than carrying out attacks elsewhere, the officials said. But the officials said Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries would soon have to contend with militants who leave Iraq equipped with considerable experience and training.
Previous warnings of this kind have been less detailed, as when Porter J. Goss, the director of central intelligence, told Congress earlier in the year that jihadists who survive the continued fighting in Iraq would leave there "experienced in and focused on acts of urban terrorism," and form "a potential pool of contacts to build transnational terrorist cells, groups and networks in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other countries."
Air Force general's statement calls for 'service before self'
The top general in the Air Force issued a servicewide statement on Tuesday warning that mixing religion with the chain of command can break down the teamwork needed for military success.
In his first action since last week's report that the Air Force Academy suffers from religious tensions, Gen. John Jumper told airmen to remember the motto of "service before self," especially chaplains.
"Spiritual strength is what drives us to make sacrifices for others (and) for our nation," Jumper said, adding that the Air Force must recognize that spirituality doesn't reside in one religion.
In the report last week, a team led by the Air Force personnel chief, Lt. Gen. Roger Brady, said evangelical Christians at the Air Force Academy were making non-evangelicals and non-Christians uncomfortable. Brig. Gen. Johnny Weida and football coach Fisher DeBerry released public apologies for using their positions to promote born-again Christian theology.
As Jumper promised more specific guidance soon for the Air Force, a congressional hearing on the report Tuesday showed the tensions between evangelical Christians and those concerned with the evangelical pressure on cadets at the academy.
"I'm a Christian, and Jesus Christ is my personal savior," said Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Texas. "I hope that didn't offend you." Conaway and other Christian conservatives on the committee said the Air Force is going too far if it restricts free religious expression. Cadets are "men and women of strong character" who don't need such coddling, Conaway said.
Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., quoted a constituent's letter referring to "from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Political Correctness."
Some Republicans on the personnel subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee criticized Brady for saying Air Force chaplains needed to be more neutral in their prayers with cadets.
'Reclaim our faith': America's pulpit politics take a left turn
America's moderate and progressive evangelists, outgunned for years by the mighty "religious right," are demanding their own share of the political action.
Their mantra, in a building campaign against conservative Christians, a key constituency of
President George W. Bush is: "Since when was God pro-war, and pro-rich?
"There is a silent majority of moderate and progressive Christians out there and other people of faith who have felt completely left out of the conversation," Jim Wallis, a leading evangelical activist, told AFP.
Christians opposed to Bush, the most overtly religious president of modern times, say his war in
Iraq, and tax cuts which they claim favor the rich, do not square with a faith which teaches followers to love their neighbor.
"We can no longer stand by and watch people speak hatred, division, war and greed in the name of our faith," said Patrick Mrotek, founder of the new Christian Alliance for Progress. "We must reclaim our faith."
Left-leaning Christians shudder at the prominence of conservative televangelists like Reverend Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who preside over vast political empires.
They are seething over comments Robertson made on the ABC News Show "This Week" in May, which implied "liberal" judges were more of a threat to America than "a few bearded terrorists who fly into buildings."
MSNBC Analyst Says Cooper Documents Reveal Karl Rove as Source in Plame Case
Friday night, on the syndicated McLaughlin Group political talk show, Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name--and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove.
A Livable Shade of Green
"Kyoto would have wrecked our economy," Mr. Bush told a Danish interviewer recently, referring to the accord to curb carbon emissions. Maybe that was a plausible argument a few years ago, but now the city of Portland is proving it flat wrong.
Newly released data show that Portland, America's environmental laboratory, has achieved stunning reductions in carbon emissions. It has reduced emissions below the levels of 1990, the benchmark for the Kyoto accord, while booming economically.
What's more, officials in Portland insist that the campaign to cut carbon emissions has entailed no significant economic price, and on the contrary has brought the city huge benefits: less tax money spent on energy, more convenient transportation, a greener city, and expertise in energy efficiency that is helping local businesses win contracts worldwide.
"People have looked at it the wrong way, as a drain," said Mayor Tom Potter, who himself drives a Prius hybrid. "Actually it's something that attracts people. ... It's economical; it makes sense in dollars."
America Held Hostage
what would happen if the United States gave up its open-ended commitment to Iraq and set a timetable for withdrawal?
Mr. Bush claims that such a step would "send the wrong signal to our troops, who need to know that we are serious about completing the mission." But what the troops need to know is that their country won't demand more than they can give. He also claims that it would encourage the insurgents, who will "know that all they have to do is to wait us out." But the insurgents don't seem to need encouragement.
It's far more likely that if the Iraqi government knew that our support had an expiration date, it would both look to its own defenses and, more important, try harder to find a political solution to the insurgency.
The Iraq that emerges once U.S. forces are gone won't bear much resemblance to the free-market, pro-American, Israel-friendly democracy the neocons promised. But it will pose less of a terrorist threat than the Iraq we have now.
Remember, Iraq wasn't a breeding ground for terrorists before we went there. All indications are that the foreign terrorists now infesting Iraq are there on the sufferance of a homegrown insurgency that finds them useful for the moment but that, brutal as it is, isn't interested in an apocalyptic confrontation with the Western world. Once we're no longer targets, the foreign terrorists won't be welcome.
The point is that the presence of American forces in Iraq is making our country less safe. So it's time to start winding down the war.
